It's as if they go around looking for places in the grammar they can unambiguously stick "static" and then back-rationalize a meaning for it.
echo 'int my_func(int i, int arr[*]);' > main.c
gcc -c -std=c99 main.c
-- * observe that there are no errors * --
Edit: I can't figure out how to escapse an asterisk, so the above might not read correctly but I tried.
In code blocks *asterisks* don't need any special
escaping as they always show up "as is". int foo(char [][*]);
int bar(char [][]);
I'm getting this from just reading the spec now, but it looks like the reason has to do with "incomplete" versus "complete" types.
Something like 'int arr[]' is an "incomplete type", i.e. an array of ints with unspecified size. While 'int arr[*]' is a complete type for an array with variable length. I'm guessing that array elements must have a complete type, which is why the above snippet gives an error.
I would think that that's exactly what they do, in order to avoid breaking existing code by introducing any more reserved words.
The actual keywords are defined with a leading underscore and a capital letter. The standard reserves all such identifiers for implementation, and so no valid conforming program should contain any such.
Thus, you get keywords like _Bool and _Complex. And then, to make them look nice, there are headers like <stdbool.h> which basically just do #define bool _Bool etc.