Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!umich!yale!cmcl2!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Re: a "derived-declarator-type-list" isn't
Message-ID: <14048@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 8 Oct 90 11:01:39 GMT
References: <1990Oct8.000812.24800@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.
Lines: 22

In article <1990Oct8.000812.24800@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
>In several of the subsections of 3.5.4, the result of a particular form
>of declarator is defined in terms of the result of a simpler form, which
>is said to supply a type "derived-declarator-type-list T".
>There is just one problem with this.  Nothing ever defines what a d-d-t-l
>is.  Despite the name, it is not a list of derived declarator types,
>and indeed it is not a list of types at all.  The ill-defined horror of
>"top type" lives on, sigh...
>An experienced C programmer, of course, "knows" what the descriptions mean.
>But he won't figure it out from the standard.

I think you're hallucinating problems into existence.  The examples in
questions all runs something like this:  "If, in the declaration "T D1",
D1 has the form ...[some well-defined syntactic construct involving d]...,
and the type specified for "ident" in the declaration "T D" is "derived-
declarator-type-list T", then the type specified for "ident" is ... [some
type description involving "derived-declarator-type-list" and "T"]".  This
is nothing more than the introduction of a bound variable "derived-
declarator-type-list" used in the same manner as the bound variable "T".
We could have used "X" instead of "derived-declarator-type-list".  There
is no need to provide a grammatical specification of the phrase, any more
than there is a need to describe the phrase "T" in the grammar.