"Damien R. Sullivan" <dasulliv@cs.indiana.edu> wrote: <snip>

For the reason that I'm lazy and don't want to have to modify all my functions which use afact, or call functions which use afact, and don't see why I should have to -- they were able to call the 'fact' function as a global, and can refer to a global 'afact' if I define it outside of main with a fixed value. I don't see why having a global dependent on outside input should be so much harder.

Never programmed in C++ much, eh? In general, getting the ordering of initialization right in the general case is a harder problem than you might think. <snip> Jon Cast