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enum { BFD_ENDIAN_BIG, ...}

Alan Modra amodra@bigpond.net.au
Mon Dec 17 17:57:00 GMT 2001 
On Mon, Dec 17, 2001 at 04:45:21PM -0800, Richard Henderson wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 18, 2001 at 10:59:41AM +1030, Alan Modra wrote:
> > While we're on this subject, note that initialising pointers (and FP) to
> > all-bits-zero via memset is not strictly portable.  Not all architectures
> > represent a NULL pointer as all-bits-zero.  The C-FAQ mentions a number
> > of such machines.  http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/top.html
> 
> Whatever.  None of them are live.

Heh.  I suppose I should have admitted noticing this strict portabilty
problem at various times, and couldn't be bothered fixing occurrences.
The thing is, a number of places in binutils do

memset (structp, 0, sizeof (*structp);

structp->ptr1 = NULL;
structp->ptr2 = NULL;
.
.

as if at some stage binutils authors were concerned about this
portability issue.  Typically, not _all_ pointers in the struct are
set to NULL, likely due to bitrot.  That's mildly confusing, and should
probably be fixed.  My inclination is to remove such "unnecessary"
initialisation.

Alan
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