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From: gwyn@smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Re: Structure tags
Message-ID: <15186@smoke.brl.mil>
Date: 13 Feb 91 21:42:43 GMT
References: <1991Feb10.185918.10775@world.std.com> <15158@smoke.brl.mil> <1991Feb12.024839.3487@world.std.com>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.
Lines: 28

In article <1991Feb12.024839.3487@world.std.com> mkahl@world.std.com (Michael Kahl) writes:
>>I must say I don't see how you could misread the standard the way you have.
>I hope that now you can.  I assumed "enclosing scope" meant "higher-level"
>scope.  I don't think this was unreasonable, although I see you meant it more
>literally.  I appreciate the clarification.

Actually, from further off-line conversation with Dennis Ritchie,
I gather that he favors your reading over mine.  This should be
additional evidence, if it were needed, that what I thought was a
clear specification is more ambiguous than I had judged it to be.

The core of the problem seems to be the definition of "same scope"
that was added to the standard during public review.  The reason
for that was that the phrase is used elsewhere in the standard,
but since file scope of various identifiers do not have identical
range, there was confusion in the opposite direction.  From the
advantage of hindsight, it probably would have been better to
change usage of "same scope" through the standard to something
like "coterminating scope" (ugh, well you get the idea), and not
have tried to define "same scope" to have a nonintuitive meaning.

As I have been suggesting, it would be useful for somebody to
request a formal interpretation ruling on this "struct foo;" issue.
While I've explained why I believe the intention to be, there is
always the possibility that I misunderstood it all along or that
the committee would NOW decide to real the standard in a different
"literal" way than the original intention.  We had to do that to
some degree for a couple of other interpretation issues.