Initialization of all elements of an array to one default value in C++?

Question

C++ Notes: Array Initialization has a nice list over initialization of arrays. I have a

int array[100] = {-1};

expecting it to be full with

Answer 1

Should be a standard feature but for some reason it's not included in standard C nor C++...

#include 

 __asm__
 (
"    .global _arr;      "
"    .section .data;    "
"_arr: .fill 100, 1, 2; "
 );

extern char arr[];

int main() 
{
    int i;

    for(i = 0; i < 100; ++i) {
        printf("arr[%u] = %u.\n", i, arr[i]);
    }
}

In Fortran you could do:

program main
    implicit none

    byte a(100)
    data a /100*2/
    integer i

    do i = 0, 100
        print *, a(i)
    end do
end

but it does not have unsigned numbers...

Why can't C/C++ just implement it. Is it really so hard? It's so silly to have to write this manually to achieve the same result...

#include 
#include 

/* did I count it correctly? I'm not quite sure. */
uint8_t arr = {
    2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2,
    2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2,
    2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2,
    2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2,
    2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2,
    2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2,
    2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2,
    2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2,
    2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2,
    2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2,
};    

int main() 
{
    int i;

    for(i = 0; i < 100; ++i) {
        printf("arr[%u] = %u.\n", i, arr[i]);
    }
}

What if it was an array of 1,000,00 bytes? I'd need to write a script to write it for me, or resort to hacks with assembly/etc. This is nonsense.

It's perfectly portable, there's no reason for it not to be in the language.

Just hack it in like:

#include 
#include 

/* a byte array of 100 twos declared at compile time. */
uint8_t twos[] = {100:2};

int main()
{
    uint_fast32_t i;
    for (i = 0; i < 100; ++i) {
        printf("twos[%u] = %u.\n", i, twos[i]);
    }

    return 0;
}

One way to hack it in is via preprocessing... (Code below does not cover edge cases, but is written to quickly demonstrate what could be done.)

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

open my $inf, "out.c";

my @lines = <$inf>;

foreach my $line (@lines) {
    if ($line =~ m/({(\d+):(\d+)})/) {
        printf ("$1, $2, $3");        
        my $lnew = "{" . "$3, "x($2 - 1) . $3 . "}";
        $line =~ s/{(\d+:\d+)}/$lnew/;
        printf $ouf $line;
    } else {
        printf $ouf $line;
    }
}

close($ouf);
close($inf);