Initializing arrays of char

[Henry Spencer]

In article <15674 at csli.Stanford.EDU> poser at csli.stanford.edu (Bill Poser) writes:
>This means that the assignment of "12345" to an array of five characters,
>is legal. If K&R2 here reflects the standard, then both initializations
>are legitimate.

It does; they are.

>This seems to me to be a bad idea. Everywhere else, one has to take
>into account the terminating null...
>... Not counting the terminating null here is inconsistent.
>Can anyone explain this decision?

It's a special case because this form of initializer is a special case.
Normally, assigning a string of any length to an array of char would be
illegal.
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Imagine life with OS/360 the standard  | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
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