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From: brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Initializing arrays of char
Message-ID: <21242:Oct604:56:1390@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Date: 6 Oct 90 04:56:13 GMT
References: <14796@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> <9418:Oct503:06:2790@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <3568@dftsrv.gsfc.nasa.gov>
Organization: IR
Lines: 16

In article <3568@dftsrv.gsfc.nasa.gov> jim@jagmac2.gsfc.nasa.gov (Jim Jagielski) writes:
> You forget that doing "char baz[] = "12345";" is the same as:
> 	char baz[] = { '1','2','3','4','5','\0' };

That's what I said. Null-terminated character arrays are called strings,
and my point was that the original poster was *not* asking about them.

Again, the right way to initialize a five-element character array is to
list the five characters explicitly:

  char baz[5] = { '1', '2', '3', '4', '5' } ;

If you use "12345", you'll confuse the reader (not to mention any old
compilers) into thinking that you really want a (0-terminated) string.

---Dan