Re: Handling 'initializer element not constant' error

In article
<9c2b13d5-b18d-498e-aec8-d239d0bb3a23@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
 <vippstar@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

>> It's a pity there isn't a standard way to get initialisation code run.

>I don't think it's that much of a problem. Well-designed code wouldn't
>use global variables.

You're letting a slogan override your common sense.  There are many
cases of global variables that are completely reasonable.

For example, I want to convert between ISO Latin-5 (an 8-bit character
set) and Unicode code points (which can be considered to have 2^16
characters for this purpose).  To do this, I have a table of 256
entries mapping Latin-5 to Unicode, and I want to build the reverse
table at start-up.  These two global variables, latin_5_to_unicode and
unicode_to_latin_5, have no objectionable properties.

> (with few exceptions such as errno)

Not a reasonable example at all.  It was adequate 20 years ago, but
today is a fine example of the problems with global variables.

-- Richard
-- 
:wq