Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!rutgers!cmcl2!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Uninitialized externals and statics
Message-ID: <10831@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 28 Aug 89 04:06:03 GMT
References: <2128@infmx.UUCP> <4700042@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <1989Aug25.185428.3511@utzoo.uucp> <609@paperboy.OSF.ORG>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 15

In article <609@paperboy.OSF.ORG> dbrooks@osf.org (David Brooks) writes:
>Anyway, I had a question: what is this assumption about "all bits
>zero" for the common case of initializing ints?  I wonder if there's
>any machine out there that represents int 0 with some other bit
>pattern...

I doubt that it would be standard-conforming.

The proposed C standard does impose some constraints on implementations
that were not technically necessary.  Among these are: integers must be
represented by a binary numeration system (allows ones and twos complement,
maybe even sign/magnitude, but not several other reasonable representations);
'0' through '9' must have ascending contiguous integral values.

The former constraint doesn't bother me, but the latter does.