Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!cmcl2!brl-adm!brl-smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Caution for those considering MSC 5.0
Message-ID: <7299@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: 20 Feb 88 16:01:11 GMT
References: <11754@brl-adm.ARPA> <620@viper.Lynx.MN.Org> <278@ho7cad.ATT.COM> <2635@haddock.ISC.COM> <1221@wjvax.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 12

In article <1221@wjvax.UUCP> brett@wjvax.UUCP (Brett Galloway) writes:
>Unless your machine obeys the convenient kludge that binary 0
>translates to a 0 object of every type, then in general a copy of the entire
>uninitialized data space must be put in the executable and loaded into
>memory.  Something like BSS is completely useless then.

No, on those architectures where different object types require
different representations for zero, it is possible to initialize
arrays (other types are best done via explicit .data) using a
small amount of run-time support code that interprets a data
descriptor template and plops down the right kinds of zero data
before main() is called.