Why didn't ANSI make initialisation consistent ????

[Dale Worley]

In article <1991Apr24.141206.18103 at grep.co.uk> vic at grep.co.uk (Victor Gavin) writes:
   I traced it back to my use of
	   char *fred = "bert"

   Could anyone tell me whether the ANSI committee pondered over the problem of
   tidying up the inconsistencies of the C initializations ?

Actually, initializations *are* consistent -- other than the object
named in the declaration, an initialization *never* allocates memory.
What is allocating the "extra" memory is the string literal "bert".
String literals *always* allocate memory for themselves, except in the
special case when they are used as the initializer for an array of
chars.  For instance,

	char *p;

	p = "1234";

allocates 5 bytes of memory to hold the string literal.

Dale Worley		Compass, Inc.			worley at compass.com
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