Why's initializing a global variable with return value of a function failing at declaration,but works fine at file scope?

Question

An 80k reputation contributor R.. told me on SO that we can\'t initialize global variables with the return value of a function as that\'s not c

Answer 1

The second version doesn't have an initializer for gvar. gvar is declared and defined at global scope without an initializer. It has static storage duration, so it is initialized with zero.

The assignment in main is just that: an assignment, not an initialization.