Sorry, from the context, you could assume the above was C++. At least in C89, floating point literals aren't constant expressions, and static initialization or

Sorry, from the context, you could assume the above was C++. At least in C89, floating point literals aren't constant expressions, and static initialization order is only defined for constant expressions. I distinctly remember getting burned by this in 2003. GCC was acting sanely, but Sun Studio was initializing two static const floats in successive lines in the same file in reverse order they were defined, resulting in 0.0 for the product of two nonzero constants. Tracking that down was rather painful. Switching the file to C++ solved the issue, but this was radio network simulation code that took several days to run on my client's $250,000 Sunfire V1280 with 96 GB of RAM (quite a large amount of RAM for 2003), and Sun's C++ compiler generated slower code for this same file. I presume some amount of monkeying with compiler flags would have brought the C++ performance back in line with the C performance, but I had more important things to do. So, I changed the static const doubles to #defines and that also fixed the bug.