*In reply to Vaino:*Sorry for introducing a few extra concepts without explaining. I am making sure that amba_bus_first gets initialized with its default initial value before any reference to that variable occurs. As a general programming rule, you should never rely on the initial state of a static variable. Although static variables get initialized before any always or initial blocks, there is no guaranteed order of initialization between static variables.
A const variable that is not a class member can only be initialized as part of its declaration. A const variable that is a class member can be initialized as part of its declaration or once as an assignment inside the class constructor.
Yes, the key reason I made local_label, an automatic variable was so that the initialization occurs when executing the initial process. I could also made local_label a static variable (which is the default outside of a class declaration), by added a separate assignment statement that write to local_label when executing the initial process.