From: aucko AT imsa DOT edu
Subject: Re: Odd behavior with static arrays
To: A DOT APPLEYARD AT fs2 DOT mt DOT umist DOT ac DOT uk (A.Appleyard)
Date: Mon, 10 Jul 1995 10:41:19 -0500 (CDT)
Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu (DJGPP mailing list)
Reply-To: ucko AT vax1 DOT rockhurst DOT edu

>   Again, why in Gnu C++ A.OUT's does every static variable and array have to
> be written out at length as reams of ascii-zeros??? It wastes disk space. In
> my university's bygone mainframes' equivalents of .EXE files, there were
> special brief formats to say "repeat the next n bytes p times" and "set the
> next n bytes to all zero". I hope this will be put right in version 2.

On many Unices (and perhaps some other systems) it doesn't really have to
waste disk space; if a block is all zeros, the file can be created with a
"hole" instead of that block.