Unnamed Structure declaration

[Rob.McConnell@Zarlink.Com]

> This is an easy one though.

> > struct wibble {
> >         int a;
> > };
> > struct wabble {
> >     struct wibble;      /**** Compiler throws a wobbly here! ****/
> >     int b;
> > };

> This isn't valid ISO C.  Some compilers support this as an extension to
> the ISO C standard, in partticular, the Microsoft compiler does.

Thought as much ; ^ )

> Gcc supported this by default for a while, but there were some issues
> with it, so nowadays gcc only supports this if you use the
> -fms-extensions option.

>From a curiosity point of view, what issues cropped up?

BTW, I noticed on earlier version of GCC (e.g. 2.96), there were quite a
few bugs surrounding anonymous struct/unions and also empty structs (e.g.
struct {}).  In particular I found that a field of a structure immediately
after an empty struct definition was not initialised correctly (defaulted
to 0). This applies to anonymous and named structs.

e.g. struct wibble {
      struct {};        /*** Empty struct definition ***/
      int a; };

      struct wibble wibble_s = {.a = 1};

Here, the value of field "a" should be initialised to 1, but in fact it is
0 if you print the value out or look at the actual hexdump using "objdump
-s ....".

Do you know when these bugs were fixed so that I can say to people "use GCC
versions later than x.y" for my work?

Many thanks for your speedy and accurate response!

Cheers,

Rob : )