malloced structure initilization

[Larry Jones]

In article <202 at sabin.UUCP> bjm at sabin.UUCP (Brendan J. McMahon) writes:
>How do you initialize memory malloced for a structure without using calloc,
>and without initilizing each structure element explicitly?

Well, if your C compiler isn't an antique the easiest thing to do
is have a static instance of the structure which is properly
initialized and just assign it to the malloc-ed one.  (If you do
have an antique compiler, you could always use memcpy to do the
assignment.)

In article <13480 at duke.cs.duke.edu>, khera at romeo.cs.duke.edu (Vick Khera) writes:
> why not just use
>  bzero((char *)fooptr, sizeof(struct foo))
> to zero out the structure.  besides, what's wrong with calloc()? have I
> missed some point you were trying to make here?

The reason for not using bzero or calloc is that all zero bit
doth not a zero make.  In particular, zeroing a pointer is not
guaranteed to make it null, nor is zeroing a floating value
guaranteed to make it 0.0.

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Larry Jones                         UUCP: uunet!sdrc!scjones
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