Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: malloced structure initilization
Message-ID: <1989Feb10.034819.26032@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <202@sabin.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 10 Feb 89 03:48:19 GMT

In article <202@sabin.UUCP> bjm@sabin.UUCP (Brendan J. McMahon) writes:
>How do you initialize memory malloced for a structure without using calloc,
>and without initilizing each structure element explicitly?

You can try using bcopy() or memset() (Berklix and SysV respectively), but
beware that things like pointers and floating-point numbers are *not*
guaranteed to be initialized to anything sensible that way.  The only way
to reliably initialize such things to specific values (like, say, NULL
or 0.0) is to do member-by-member initialization.  The bit patterns for
NULL and 0.0 are not guaranteed to be all zeros.
-- 
The Earth is our mother;       |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
our nine months are up.        | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu