Grammer discrepancies for external data definitions.

[Henry Spencer]

In article <8014 at cup.portal.com> bcase at cup.portal.com writes:
>"External declarations without any specifiers or qualifiers (just a naked
>declarator) are fobidden."  Yet it seems that at least some claimed-ANSI C
>compilers accept this and do what you might expect (allocate room for an int).
>At least one C++ implementation disallows it.  To those of you with the ANSI
>spec sitting in front of you, I ask "what is the correct behavior?"

The May draft (no, my copy *still* hasn't come, dammit, but I've borrowed
a friend's because time is running out) has the grammar set up in such a
way that at least one storage class specifier ("extern" etc.), type
specifier ("int" etc.), or type qualifier ("const" etc.) must appear.
Some compilers may well accept a more general syntax for the sake of
backwards compatibility.

				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu
-- 
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