Multidimensional Static Array Initialization Follow-up

[Tim Graham]

Hello again everyone,

>From a couple of the responses which I have received (thanks, by the way, to
those who took the trouble to respond), it has become fairly clear that I 
didn't express myself completely clearly in my original posting.

I am not under the impression that C multi-dimensional arrays are
non-rectangular; it is precisely because of their rectangularity
that it appears so easy to implement initialization in a manner
analogous to 1-D static array (without size declarator) initialization.

For example, if we have the declaration

	int foo[][4] = { { 1, 2,  3,  4  },
		 	 { 5, 8          },
		 	 { 9, 10, 12     } };

then the unitialized elements in the 3x4 array are filled with zeros.  Is
it really that much harder for it to be possible to implement a declaration
like
	
	int foo[][] = { { 1, 2,  3,  4  },
		 	 { 5, 8          },
		 	 { 9, 10, 12     } };

and have it do exactly the same thing without the bother of me having to
know in advance what the largest number of elements to appear in any row
is going to be?  It seems as though it would be possible for a compiler
to calculate how large each of the dimensions would need to be and then
just allocate the space.  There's not even any memory wasted since, whether
I have to declare in advance how large each dimension is or not, the resultant
array is the same size.

So, what I meant to ask in my original posting was why are things not
implemented in this way?

Thanks again to those who responded to my query, and thanks in advance to
those who will respond.


Tim Graham

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