On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 03:04:28PM +0200, Bruno Haible wrote: > Hi Gavin, > > I see this commit: > * install-info/install-info.c (output_dirfile): Avoid mixed > declaration and statements. > > Is it possible nowadays to assume ISO C99 mixed declaration and statements > are supported by the C compiler? I don't know about the portability targets > of TeXinfo, but for those of Gnulib, documented in [1], we can now make > this assumption [2].
It may have been some MS-Windows compiler (MSVC?) that didn't support it, but I don't know the history behind this. I haven't been aware of any problems with mixed declarations and statements. I remember they've gone unnoticed for a while before being fixed, and nobody's complained. Indeed, I expect that there are other constructs that are also invalid C89, in particular non-constant initialisers that are used quite a lot, e.g. char *text1 = (*entry1)->text; I am going to take out the recommendation that we check for this with compiler warnings as this would simplify things.
