OT: Requesting C advice

[Les Mikesell]

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 at gmail.com