c - C89, Mixing Variable Declarations and Code

Question

I'm very curious to know why exactly C89 compilers will dump on you when you try to mix variable declarations and code, like this for example:

rutski@imac:~$ cat test.c
#include <stdio.h>

int
main(void)
{
    printf("Hello World!
");
    int x = 7;
    printf("%d!
", x);
    return 0;
}
rutski@imac:~$ gcc -std=c89 -pedantic test.c
test.c: In function ‘main’:
test.c:7: warning: ISO C90 forbids mixed declarations and code
rutski@imac:~$ 

Yes, you can avoid this sort of thing by staying away from -pedantic. But then your code is no longer standards compliant. And as anybody capable of answering this post probably already knows, this is not just a theoretical concern. Platforms like Microsoft's C compiler enforce this quick in the standard under any and all circumstances.

Given how ancient C is, I would imagine that this feature is due to some historical issue dating back to the extraordinary hardware limitations of the 70's, but I don't know the details. Or am I totally wrong there?

Answer 1

The C standard said "thou shalt not", because it was not allowed in the earlier C compilers which the C89 standard standardized. It was a radical enough step to create a language that could be used for writing an operating system and its utilities. The concept probably simply wasn't considered - no other language at the time allowed it (Pascal, Algol, PL/1, Fortran, COBOL), so C didn't need to either. And it probably makes the compiler slightly harder to handle (bigger), and the original compilers were space-constrained by the 64 KiB code and 64 KiB data space allowed in the PDP 11 series (the big machines; the littler ones only allowed 64 KiB for both code and data, AFAIK). So, extra complexity was not a good idea.

It was C++ that allowed declarations and variables to be interleaved, but C++ is not, and never has been, C. However, C99 finally caught up with C++ (it is a useful feature). Sadly, though, Microsoft never implemented C99.