On Mon, 1 May 2000, David Forrest wrote:
> I remember that initially BSS meant Bull-S___ Storage, and was
> uninitiallized and in an indeterminate state. It should be initiallized
> before reads, and should not be counted on to be anything: Cautious
> programmers avoid using uninitialized variables, and good compilers warn
> them if they do. If Linux has an initially zero storage space, it has
> more overhead, and isn't quite the old BSS.
No, BSS does not originare from "Bull-S___ Storage" but from ancient IBM
asm symbol "bss - block started by symbol". And although it is quite a
habit for experienced programmers to not assume "x is initialized" unless
one can point his finger to the place where x is initialized, as Alan
correctly pointed out the standard demands it so it is perfectly ok to
rely on it (especially since the kernel enforced it by explicit
initialization to zero).
Regards,
Tigran.
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