Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!mcvax!ukc!its63b!hwcs!chris From: chris@cs.hw.ac.uk (Chris Miller) Newsgroups: comp.sources.bugs Subject: Re: Minor fixes to NetHack 1.4f Message-ID: <1438@brahma.cs.hw.ac.uk> Date: Sun, 23-Aug-87 07:10:10 EDT Article-I.D.: brahma.1438 Posted: Sun Aug 23 07:10:10 1987 Date-Received: Tue, 25-Aug-87 01:29:41 EDT References: <83@b.gp.cs.cmu.edu> Reply-To: chris@cs.hw.ac.uk (Chris Miller) Organization: Computer Science, Heriot-Watt U., Scotland Lines: 34 In article <83@b.gp.cs.cmu.edu> ralf@b.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Ralf Brown) writes: > >The new 1.4f version of NetHack has a number of typos! >... >Finally, two minor changes for Turbo C: >... >Also, the fileinfo[] array of structures needs to be zeroed out (at least >the "where" field) at the beginning. Uninitialized global arrays are not >zeroed out in Turbo C (and probably many other compilers), ... This does not seem to be the case in Turbo C; the User Guide, page 168 states "In C, all global variables are initialized to 0 by default unless you explicitly initialize them to a different value". Any compiler that did not implement this would not be a true C compiler. I have attempted to determine empirically whether Turbo C conforms to its own documentation in this respect, and as far as I can tell, it does (of course, no amount of such testing can constitute proof). In each memory model, and for each scalar type, some pointer types, and a structure type containing char, int, long, float and double fields, I declared an uninitialised global array and wrote a loop to compare each element (each field of each element, for the structure) against the constant 0 (uncast, and hence implicitly cast to the type of the appropriate element). In every case, all components of the array (and fields of the structure) were initialised properly to 0. I have not encountered the bug that you describe in NetHack, either. Is this a problem with very early releases of Turbo C? -- Chris Miller, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh chris@cs.hw.ac.uk !ukc!hwcs!chris chris@hwcs.uucp chris@uk.ac.hw.cs