Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: Uninitialized externals and statics. Message-ID: <1989Aug17.162206.21724@utzoo.uucp> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology References: <2128@infmx.UUCP> Date: Thu, 17 Aug 89 16:22:06 GMT In article <2128@infmx.UUCP> dror@infmx.UUCP (Dror Matalon) writes: > K&R 2.4 say "External and static variables are initialized >to zero by default, but it is good style to state the initialization >anyway." > > Is this really portable ? I always initialize globals but I want >to know if I need to change some old stuff that counts on uninitialized >variables being initialized to zero. The initialization to zero for external and static variables is a property of the C language; all definitions of the language agree on this. Any compiler that does not implement it is broken. Note that automatic variables (i.e., essentially all variables defined within a function) do *not* get initialized to anything in particular. -- V7 /bin/mail source: 554 lines.| Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 1989 X.400 specs: 2200+ pages. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu