I have structures that look (sort of) like this:

struct Foo {
  Type1[Type2] map;

  struct _bar {
     // stuff
  } _bar[] bars;
}

I want to declare a static array of these structs, and initialize it with a static initializer:

const Foo[5] dataTable = {
  0: {
        // initializers for dataTable[0]
     }
  1: {
        // initializers for dataTable[1]
     }
   ...
}

What exactly would be the syntax?

Russell Lewis wrote:
> I have structures that look (sort of) like this:
> 
> struct Foo {
>   Type1[Type2] map;
> 
>   struct _bar {
>      // stuff
>   } _bar[] bars;
> }
> 
> I want to declare a static array of these structs, and initialize it with a static initializer:
> 
> const Foo[5] dataTable = {
>   0: {
>         // initializers for dataTable[0]
>      }
>   1: {
>         // initializers for dataTable[1]
>      }
>    ...
> }
> 
> What exactly would be the syntax?

There's no initialiser syntax for associative arrays; for normal arrays it's a comma-separated list in between square brackets.  I think it should be deferred to the semantic phase to decide whether this is an associative array initialisation or a normal array; so it would be:

    char [] [int] dict = [
        0: "bar",
        1: "y",
    ];

This amount is easy, the compiler has to do all the stages up to it for normal arrays and it's mostly just a case for the semantic and the code generator.  The problem's mostly that building associative arrays in the compiler is no fun.  That's not a very good excuse until you have to do it.  :-)  It's on my TODO, Walter's too I'm sure.

In this exact case, use a static constructor function, and make the array non-const of course.