Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!ico!ism780c!news
From: news@ism780c.isc.com (News system)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Zero Length Arrays Allowed in C Standard?
Message-ID: <37140@ism780c.isc.com>
Date: 1 Dec 89 22:43:32 GMT
References: <2298@jato.Jpl.Nasa.Gov>
Reply-To: marv@ism780.UUCP (Marvin Rubenstein)
Organization: Interactive Systems Corp., Santa Monica CA
Lines: 19

In article <2298@jato.Jpl.Nasa.Gov> baalke@mars.jpl.nasa.gov (Ron Baalke) writes:
:
:I've inherited some C code that had the following declaration in it:
:
:     char tbi[0];
:
:When I tried to compile this using Turbo C v2.0 or VAX C, it was flagged as
:a fatal error. My question is this: are zero length arrays allowed in the
:ANSI standard for C?

No. Here is the quote from the standard of Dec 7, 1988 (page 68, line 3):

    The expression delimited by [ and ] (which specifies the size of the
    of an array) shall be an integral constant expression that has a value
    greater than zero.

I believe this one of the hot issues debated by the committee.

  Marv Rubinstein