[vpalanc1]

I think the other solutions proposed are better, but:

> Sadly, you can't set the value of an index in an array like that in the top level in C, only inside functions.

This is not exactly true. An assignment is a value, you can do e.g.

int a = b[x] = 0;

(which implies that you can do your array-index assignments at the global level by creating nonsensical/unused variables and initializing them).