Uninitialized externals and statics

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <609 at paperboy.OSF.ORG> dbrooks at osf.org (David Brooks) writes:
>Anyway, I had a question: what is this assumption about "all bits
>zero" for the common case of initializing ints?  I wonder if there's
>any machine out there that represents int 0 with some other bit
>pattern...

I doubt that it would be standard-conforming.

The proposed C standard does impose some constraints on implementations
that were not technically necessary.  Among these are: integers must be
represented by a binary numeration system (allows ones and twos complement,
maybe even sign/magnitude, but not several other reasonable representations);
'0' through '9' must have ascending contiguous integral values.

The former constraint doesn't bother me, but the latter does.