Pardon the ignorance

[Don Sullivan]

In the change to stdio.h in FreeBSD 4.8, you say:
"std{in,out,err} are no longer compile time constants."

Please pardon my incredible ignorance, but what does that mean ?
Can you please point me to a reference ?

FILE *def_thing = stdout;

no longer works.
apparently, it shouldn't. why ?

Thanks for your time,
Don
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       Don Sullivan
       NASA Ames Research Center
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       email: dsullivan at gaia.arc.nasa.gov
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Just another network geek,
 happily implementing RFC 748 whenever possible