Declaring and initializing arrays in C

Question

Is there a way to declare first and then initialize an array in C?

So far I have been initializing an array like this:

int myArray[SIZE] = {1,2,3,4..         


        

Answer 1

The OP left out some crucial information from the question and only put it in a comment to an answer.

I need to initialize after declaring, because will be different depending on a condition, I mean something like this int myArray[SIZE]; if(condition1) { myArray{x1, x2, x3, ...} } else if(condition2) { myArray{y1, y2, y3, ...} } . . and so on...

With this in mind, all of the possible arrays will need to be stored into data somewhere anyhow, so no memcpy is needed (or desired), only a pointer and a 2d array are required.

//static global since some compilers build arrays from instruction data
//... notably not const though so they can later be modified if needed
#define SIZE 8
static int myArrays[2][SIZE] = {{0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7},{7,6,5,4,3,2,1,0}};

static inline int *init_myArray(_Bool conditional){
  return myArrays[conditional];
}

// now you can use:
//int *myArray = init_myArray(1 == htons(1)); //any boolean expression

The not-inlined version gives this resulting assembly on x86_64:

init_myArray(bool):
        movzx   eax, dil
        sal     rax, 5
        add     rax, OFFSET FLAT:myArrays
        ret
myArrays:
        .long   0
        .long   1
        .long   2
        .long   3
        .long   4
        .long   5
        .long   6
        .long   7
        .long   7
        .long   6
        .long   5
        .long   4
        .long   3
        .long   2
        .long   1
        .long   0

For additional conditionals/arrays, just change the 2 in myArrays to the desired number and use similar logic to get a pointer to the right array.