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Postings from August 2000
>Tom Christiansen wrote:
>> C type declarations are pretty universally despised.
>By whom?
>This is news to me. I have always thought that the C type declaration
>is a concise and platform-independent way of declaring a packed
>structure, and effectively hiding implementation details (offsets into it)
>from the programmer.
>What is wrong with them, that makes them despicable?
Hiding the padding means that two compilers might not be able
to get at the same thing.
If you've ever tried to properly declare signal(3), you'll
see the main pain I was thinking about:
void (*signal (int, void (*) (int))) (int);
It's not normally so bad with most structures, but try declaring
an array of functions that return pointers to functions. :-(
--tom