Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!auspex!guy
From: guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Debugging, statics.
Keywords: C style static initialization
Message-ID: <774@auspex.UUCP>
Date: 21 Dec 88 22:36:31 GMT
References: <421@aber-cs.UUCP> <127@mole-end.UUCP>
Reply-To: guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris)
Distribution: eunet,world
Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara
Lines: 50

>The difficulty in C is that you can't force an instance of a struct to
>be initialized when it is declared, especially if it is declared
>locally.

Err, umm, better make that "*only* if it declared locally".  There's no
particular problem with

	struct foo {
		int a;
		char *b;
		float c;
	} bar = {
		666,
		"Hello, sailor!",
		137.06
	};

if "bar" is "static" or "external".

>Because there is no automatic aggregate initialization,

Automatic initialization is often (always?) just syntactic sugar.  You
can do

	foo()
	{
		int a = 33;
		struct foo b = { 666, "Hello, sailor!", 137.06};

		...
	}

by doing

	foo()
	{
		int a = 33;
		struct foo b;

		b.a = 666;
		b.b = "Hello, sailor!";
		b.c = 137.06;

		...
	}

The problem here appears to be that C makes it inconvenient to have
non-automatic, private data that belongs to an *instance* of the
generator; there's only one copy of a "static", so you don't get one per
customer.  (C doesn't make it *impossible*, of course.)