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Comment by Findecanor | Hacker News Reader

Changing it would break existing code. In C, types "A" and "struct A" could have been defined as completely different types.

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Sounds like: We've always done it this way. Often rephrased as: Its not possible to write a script to fix this. We can't have automated tests. There's no way we can find all the places this is likely to be used. There's no way to do this at all because insert-authority-figure's-opinion. Oh no! But really its all historical rather than a real issue.

Its just a code smell. There are likely other bugs hiding around the code. Business logic issues as well. Overall its a story of generally poorly written and ambiguous code. So... Perhaps fix it?

If you can't fix it then a compiler option would do it.

That's a strawman. The reason is the option would break code due to C's semantics, in the best case it would fail to compile, and in the worst case it would still compile but change what the code did.

What you're asking for is equivalent to changing the semantics of the language, which is frankly untenable for C.

I'll leave it there. I respectfully agree to disagree. What to you looks like a strawman is for us a signpost towards identifying a module that needs linting and code review. Code that cannot handle that typedef change? Yeah it needs review. What other issues are hiding in there? Oh wait what have they been doing with the preprocessor?

The codebases we work on are from the 1980s. They sorely need to be dragged kicking and screaming if necessary to later standards. So many warts. People abused the preprocessor like it was normal and expected.

The semantic change isn’t as big as you'd expect. Even as it is in fact a semantic change. But I sense significant gatekeeping as well to hold back the tide.

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