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From: gwyn@brl-smoke.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Arrays of Unknown Length in Structures (and sizeof)
Message-ID: <6501@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 2-Oct-87 16:49:29 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-smok.6501
Posted: Fri Oct  2 16:49:29 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 3-Oct-87 09:54:47 EDT
References: <243@mit-prep.ARPA> <1044@ius1.cs.cmu.edu> <786@cc5.bbn.com.BBN.COM> <10760@beta.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 12

In article <10760@beta.UUCP> dph@LANL.GOV.ARPA (David P Huelsbeck) writes:
>I'm trying to imagine what possible semantics could be associated
>with a zero-sized array. An array name is a constant that contains
>the starting address of some pre-allocated space in memory. In other
>words it's a pointer constant. What value could the compiler assign
>that would point to zero pre-allocated memory locations? NULL?

There isn't any problem, really.  The compiler can allocate a location
for the 0-sized object.  The tricky part is that it should probably
skip at least one byte before allocating the next object anyway, so
that all distinct objects have distinct addresses.  I think this
consideration is what killed the proposal for malloc(0).