Re: What does zero-length array mean at file scope?

[Dave Korn <dave dot korn dot cygwin at googlemail dot com>]

Andrew Haley wrote:
> Dave Korn wrote:
>> Dave Korn wrote:
>>> Dave Korn wrote:
>>> 
>>>> ELF GAS/LD seem happy enough when presented with a ".comm foo,0"
>>>> directive, but PE does rather literally what you asked, and gives you
>>>> no data object, leading to i0 in the above being an undefined
>>>> reference at link time.
>>> After a bit further digging, it turns out that this is because PE uses
>>> the same representation for an external symbol as would represent a
>>> common of size 0, so if you define such a common, it magically becomes
>>> an undefined external symbol instead!
> 
> I don't see what the big deal is here: just allocate one byte to a
> statically- allocated zero-length array.

  The "big deal" is that this is blatantly and trivially invalid code, and we
silently accept it and generate nonsensical assembler output without the least
hint of any kind of a diagnostic.

"  6.7.5.2 Array declarators
Constraints
1 In addition to optional type qualifiers and the keyword static, the [ and
] may delimit an expression or *. If they delimit an expression (which
specifies the size of an array), the expression shall have an integer type. If
the expression is a constant expression, it shall have a value greater than
zero.  "

> Sure, but in that case it's clearly the user's fault: they're writing
> beyond the bounds of an  array.

  But how, as a user, would you attempt to write /within/ the bounds of such
an array?  Exactly.  So why should we let the user create this meaningless
construct in the first place?

    cheers,
      DaveK