Mike McCarty wrote:
That must be something recent. Also some people believed that it did in
IIRC, it was mentioned in K&R v1.
[snip]
This part I am sure of, because I have had to fix many, many peoples
code due to this belief. The ANSI comittee may have changed the
standard, but I would bet that a lot of older compilers still generate
code with no initialization.
I sort-of remember some discussion about this back when people were
trying to run unix on machines without memory management. Usually the
OS would zero blocks of memory before allocating it to a process for
security reasons but I don't think C ever guaranteed that. Lint should
always have warned you about using uninitialized variables, though.
Older? ANSI C is since 1989. I guess one could characterize 19 years
as "older". :-)
C was old before ANSI came along. Maybe we could revive the discussion
of why "abcd"[2] must evaluate to 'c'.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
