On Fri, 25 Oct 2013 04:55:43 -0700, Mark Janssen wrote: > On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 8:40 PM, Mark Lawrence <breamore...@yahoo.co.uk> > wrote: >> On 22/10/2013 18:37, Oscar Benjamin wrote:
>>> OTOH why in particular would you want to initialise them with zeros? >>> I often initialise arrays to nan which is useful for debugging. > Is this some kind of joke? What has this list become? We used to initialize RAM to 0xdeadbeef on CPU reset (and sometimes calls to free in a debugging environment) for the same reason: if a program crashesd, and I saw that value in one of the CPU registers, then I knew that some part of the program accessed "uninitialized" (or freed) memory. That pattern also sticks out like a sore thumb (insert your own C++/hammer joke here) in a core dump. That said, I seem to recall that somewhere along the way, ANSI C began to guarantee that certain static (in the technical sense) values were initialized to 0, or NULL, or something like that, on program startup, before any user-level code executed. Dan -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
