[gmx-developers] uninitialized data

[Erik Lindahl]

On Apr 21, 2009, at 9:00 PM, David van der Spoel wrote:

> Alexander Herz wrote:
>> of course it must be
>> memset(fr,0,sizeof(t_forcerec)); as fr is a pointer
>
> snew does this.

In practice you're right, but:

1) It is incredibly bad coding habit to rely on the behaviour of  
memory allocation for initializing objects.

2) Formally it is even wrong (but so is memset). There is nothing in  
the ISO C standard that *requires* NULL to be represented by numerical  
0.

Cheers,

Erik