static structures

From: Skybuck Flying (nospam_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 10/31/04 

Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 14:08:29 +0100

Hello,

I have a question about the C language.

This piece of code is from the glibc library.

My question is about the static struct

The question is....

Are static structures automatically initialized ?

static struct random_data unsafe_state =
  {
/* FPTR and RPTR are two pointers into the state info, a front and a rear
   pointer. These two pointers are always rand_sep places aparts, as they
   cycle through the state information. (Yes, this does mean we could get
   away with just one pointer, but the code for random is more efficient
   this way). The pointers are left positioned as they would be from the
call:
 initstate(1, randtbl, 128);
   (The position of the rear pointer, rptr, is really 0 (as explained above
   in the initialization of randtbl) because the state table pointer is set
   to point to randtbl[1] (as explained below).) */

    .fptr = &randtbl[SEP_3 + 1],
    .rptr = &randtbl[1],

/* The following things are the pointer to the state information table,
   the type of the current generator, the degree of the current polynomial
   being used, and the separation between the two pointers.
   Note that for efficiency of random, we remember the first location of
   the state information, not the zeroth. Hence it is valid to access
   state[-1], which is used to store the type of the R.N.G.
   Also, we remember the last location, since this is more efficient than
   indexing every time to find the address of the last element to see if
   the front and rear pointers have wrapped. */

    .state = &randtbl[1],

    .rand_type = TYPE_3,
    .rand_deg = DEG_3,
    .rand_sep = SEP_3,

    .end_ptr = &randtbl[sizeof (randtbl) / sizeof (randtbl[0])]
};

Bye,
  Skybuck.