No warning in VB.NET when function has no return

Question

Some comments on Stack Overflow question Why doesn\'t the C# compiler stop properties from referring to themselves? regarding warnings got me thinking about old issues that

Answer 1

The warning will only let you know when a function is going to return Nothing by default.

You would get a warning if return value was of a reference type.

But your function has a return value of a value type, and those cannot be Nothing. Therefore, no warning.

This is because function name inside this very function acts as a result variable. You can return a value by assigning it to the function name instead of using Return. And all variables are initialized with default values, including the function-name variable. This is not the case in C, hence the different meaning of the warning.

Compare this to using variables before initializing them:

Dim x As Integer
CallFunction(x)  'No warning, x is implicitly and properly initialized to 0.

Dim y as Object
CallFunction(y)  'A warning: variable used before a value is assigned to it