Python Front-end to GCC
Dan Sommers
dan at tombstonezero.net
Fri Oct 25 08:55:22 EDT 2013
On Fri, 25 Oct 2013 04:55:43 -0700, Mark Janssen wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 8:40 PM, Mark Lawrence <breamoreboy at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>> On 22/10/2013 18:37, Oscar Benjamin wrote:
>>> OTOH why in particular would you want to initialise them with zeros?
>>> I often initialise arrays to nan which is useful for debugging.
> Is this some kind of joke? What has this list become?
We used to initialize RAM to 0xdeadbeef on CPU reset (and sometimes
calls to free in a debugging environment) for the same reason: if a
program crashesd, and I saw that value in one of the CPU registers, then
I knew that some part of the program accessed "uninitialized" (or freed)
memory. That pattern also sticks out like a sore thumb (insert your own
C++/hammer joke here) in a core dump.
That said, I seem to recall that somewhere along the way, ANSI C began
to guarantee that certain static (in the technical sense) values were
initialized to 0, or NULL, or something like that, on program startup,
before any user-level code executed.
Dan
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