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Date: Sun, 26 Nov 2000 10:37:07 +0000 (GMT)
From: Tigran Aivazian <tigran@veritas.com>
To: Tim Waugh <twaugh@redhat.com>
cc: James A Sutherland <jas88@cam.ac.uk>, Andries Brouwer <aeb@veritas.com>,
        Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] removal of "static foo = 0"
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On Sat, 25 Nov 2000, Tim Waugh wrote:

> On Sat, Nov 25, 2000 at 10:53:00PM +0000, James A Sutherland wrote:
> 
> > Which is silly. The variable is explicitly defined to be zero
> > anyway, whether you put this in your code or not.
> 
> Why doesn't the compiler just leave out explicit zeros from the
> 'initial data' segment then?  Seems like it ought to be tought to..

yes, taught to, _BUT_ never let this to be a default option, please.
Because there are valid cases where a programmer things "this is in .data"
and that means this should be in .data. Think of binary patching an object
as one valid example (there may be others, I forgot).

Regards,
Tigran

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