Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!mcvax!ukc!stc!idec!alice!fox
From: fox@alice.marlow.reuters.co.uk (Paul Fox)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Uninitialized global data (was Re: Global variables)
Message-ID: <275@alice.marlow.reuters.co.uk>
Date: 26 Feb 88 17:17:30 GMT
References: <1744@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Organization: Reuters Ltd, London, England
Lines: 14
Summary: ..bss

In article <1744@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>, rjchen@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Raymond Juimong Chen) writes:
> I believe that global data initialized to zero go into a special
> segment called "bss".  What it stands for is beyond me.  ...

'bss', I believe, comes from the early IBM assemblers. It stands for 'Block
Started by Symbol'. This was/is a pseudo op which reserves spaces in
the data area, used as in:

fred:	bss	12		// Reserve 12 bytes.

[Excuse the syntax if its wrong].

I presume that this pseudo op was present in the early PDP-7 & 11 assemblers as
well. (On the PDP-10, BLKZ or BLK was used).