Need a way to initialize protected data from registry

We would like to have registry variables protected to keep them from accidentally being modified. However, this currently prevents them from being initialized after they are allocated if they are not assigned an initial value.

- One solution is to provide an allocation routine for each variable which does not have an initiali value.
- This routine may be called once (error if called a second time).
- If the function takes the variable's values as an input, this could require an extra copy (once to collect the data and a second to copy it into the registry variable). I do not see an easy workaround for that.