Automatic Pilot
The notion of storage classes is essential to the solution of another mystery. You may recall that I mentioned some time ago that C++ doesn't provide automatic initialization of all variables because that facility would make a program bigger and slower. I'll admit that the truth of this isn't intuitively obvious to the casual observer; after all, a variable (or more exactly, the storage location it occupies) has to have some value, so why not something reasonable? As we have just seen, this is done for static variables. However, there is another storage class for which such a facility isn't quite as easy or inexpensive to implement;[14] that's the auto (short for "automatic") storage class, which is the default class used for ...
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