mjs@hpfcso.HP.COM (Marc Sabatella) (12/05/90)
In the 1990 C++ Reference manual, there is an explict mention in 3.4 that initializiation for a translation unit may be deferred to any point in time before the first use of a function or object defined in that translation unit. I can find no such disclaimer in the 1986 edition; in fact there seems to be the implicit assumption that all such initialization will be performed before main() is invoked (p. 158). Was this an intentional change? Are there existing systems that take advantage of the relaxed requirement in the newer spec? I did a literature search at our library with keywords "constructor", "initialization", "patch", etc, but could find no reference to techniques for deferring initialization, or what the real world advantages of such deferral might be. -------------- Marc Sabatella (marc@hpmonk.fc.hp.com) Disclaimers: 2 + 2 = 3, for suitably small values of 2 Bill and Dave may not always agree with me