Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!brl-adm!brl-smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Uninitialized global data (was Re: Global variables)
Message-ID: <7530@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: 23 Mar 88 21:02:35 GMT
References: <1744@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <978@mcgill-vision.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 10

In article <978@mcgill-vision.UUCP> mouse@mcgill-vision.UUCP (der Mouse) writes:
>Could someone with access to the draft clear this up?

Without even looking it up, I can tell you that the default initial
values are required to be zeros of the right type.  Pointers would
have null pointer values, integer types all 0 bits (in effect), and
floating point data would have 0.0 even if the bit pattern required
for this is not all 0 bits.  On many implementations, filling BSS
with all-0 bytes will do the trick, but there are those that require
more elaborate initialization.