Uninitialized externals and statics

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <24FD69D9.12F at marob.masa.com> cowan at marob.masa.com (John Cowan) writes:
>Does the pANS still guarantee that the chars used in C programming (letters,
>numbers, !@#$%^&*()_+ etc.) are non-negative?

The actual source code characters don't have values.  The execution-
environment values for the corresponding run-time characters (thus,
character constants) are indeed required to be positive.  Other
characters (not corresponding to those in the official C source
character set) can have any values representable in a byte.  (A byte
is whatever a C char is, not necessarily 8 bits.)