I sent these changes in with a bunch of others. Some were folded in but
others, like these, were not. I am not sure why so I am resending this
to the developers list by itself for discussion.
The readon why I suggest these changes is that the compiler can't tell
that minimum_count is initialized before it is used. The tests that I
add in here will cause an immediate error if it doesn't. As the comments
below suggest, if it is 100% guaranteed that the variable will always
be initialized then how this is so should be commented here. I don't
know how much strain the actual test puts on the performance but if it
isn't too much then maybe leave it in for absolute safety anyway.
There are also a few returns just to stop warnings.