• Russell Lewis <spamhole-2001-07-16 deming-os.org> Oct 03 2002
• Burton Radons <loth users.sourceforge.net> Oct 03 2002

Russell Lewis <spamhole-2001-07-16 deming-os.org> writes:

I have structures that look (sort of) like this:

struct Foo {
   Type1[Type2] map;

   struct _bar {
      // stuff
   } _bar[] bars;
}

I want to declare a static array of these structs, and initialize it 
with a static initializer:

const Foo[5] dataTable = {
   0: {
         // initializers for dataTable[0]
      }
   1: {
         // initializers for dataTable[1]
      }
    ...
}

What exactly would be the syntax?

Burton Radons <loth users.sourceforge.net> writes:

Russell Lewis wrote:
 I have structures that look (sort of) like this:
 
 struct Foo {
   Type1[Type2] map;
 
   struct _bar {
      // stuff
   } _bar[] bars;
 }
 
 I want to declare a static array of these structs, and initialize it 
 with a static initializer:
 
 const Foo[5] dataTable = {
   0: {
         // initializers for dataTable[0]
      }
   1: {
         // initializers for dataTable[1]
      }
    ...
 }
 
 What exactly would be the syntax?


There's no initialiser syntax for associative arrays; for normal arrays 
it's a comma-separated list in between square brackets.  I think it 
should be deferred to the semantic phase to decide whether this is an 
associative array initialisation or a normal array; so it would be:

     char [] [int] dict = [
         0: "bar",
         1: "y",
     ];

This amount is easy, the compiler has to do all the stages up to it for 
normal arrays and it's mostly just a case for the semantic and the code 
generator.  The problem's mostly that building associative arrays in the 
compiler is no fun.  That's not a very good excuse until you have to do 
it.  :-)  It's on my TODO, Walter's too I'm sure.

In this exact case, use a static constructor function, and make the 
array non-const of course.