Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!olivea!samsung!uunet!virtech!cpcahil
From: cpcahil@virtech.uucp (Conor P. Cahill)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Initializing arrays of char
Message-ID: <1990Oct05.191543.29538@virtech.uucp>
Date: 5 Oct 90 19:15:43 GMT
References: <1990Oct4.152756.6850@micrognosis.co.uk> <15674@csli.Stanford.EDU>
Reply-To: cpcahil@virtech.UUCP (Conor P. Cahill)
Organization: Virtual Technologies Inc., Sterling VA
Lines: 30

In article <15674@csli.Stanford.EDU> poser@csli.stanford.edu (Bill Poser) writes:
>This means that the assignment of "12345" to an array of five characters,
>is legal. If K&R2 here reflects the standard, then both initializations
>are legitimate.

While it is "legal" it still should get a warning since it is doing something
that you may not expect.

>This seems to me to be a bad idea. Everywhere else, one has to take
>into account the terminating null. For example, x[5] = 'a' is
>an error. Not counting the terminating null here is inconsistent.

This has nothing to do with a terminating null.  x[5] is illegal because
you are accessing an element beyound the end of the array (assuming it
was declared as char x[5]).

>Can anyone explain this decision?

Probably because that was the existing standard (the way C has worked all
along).  

Another way to look at this is that "char x[dim];" declares an array
of characters, not a character string.  So the null need not be there and
without this rule you couldn't initialize the last element of the 
array to be a non-null.

-- 
Conor P. Cahill            (703)430-9247        Virtual Technologies, Inc.,
uunet!virtech!cpcahil                           46030 Manekin Plaza, Suite 160
                                                Sterling, VA 22170