Following up Toomey's and Davidson's notes (didn't see Garcia's): It does appear that the early-distributed v7 didn't require = in initializers. A slightly later version of the original 11 C compiler did; the lines Davidson quoted, if (o!=ASSIGN) peeksym = o; were replaced by if (o!=ASSIGN) { error("Declaration syntax"); peeksym = o; } bringing it into conformity with K&R1, which did require the =. Incidentally, if anyone wants to try the v7 crypt(3), the 'encrypt' routine has an implicit, and unwarranted, assumption that the L and R arrays are adjacent in storage and thus that L can be oversubscripted to access R. This was fixed at some (surprisingly late) point too. Dennis