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From: scjones@sdrc.UUCP (Larry Jones)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: malloced structure initilization
Message-ID: <525@sdrc.UUCP>
Date: 10 Feb 89 23:42:14 GMT
References: <202@sabin.UUCP> <13480@duke.cs.duke.edu>
Organization: Structural Dynamics Research Corp., Cincinnati
Lines: 27

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?

Well, if your C compiler isn't an antique the easiest thing to do
is have a static instance of the structure which is properly
initialized and just assign it to the malloc-ed one.  (If you do
have an antique compiler, you could always use memcpy to do the
assignment.)

In article <13480@duke.cs.duke.edu>, khera@romeo.cs.duke.edu (Vick Khera) writes:
> why not just use
>  bzero((char *)fooptr, sizeof(struct foo))
> to zero out the structure.  besides, what's wrong with calloc()? have I
> missed some point you were trying to make here?

The reason for not using bzero or calloc is that all zero bit
doth not a zero make.  In particular, zeroing a pointer is not
guaranteed to make it null, nor is zeroing a floating value
guaranteed to make it 0.0.

----
Larry Jones                         UUCP: uunet!sdrc!scjones
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