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From: antispam@fricas.org (Waldek Hebisch)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: "A diagram of C23 basic types"
Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2025 18:31:03 -0000 (UTC)
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Keith Thompson <Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com> wrote:
> antispam@fricas.org (Waldek Hebisch) writes:
>> Tim Rentsch <tr.17687@z991.linuxsc.com> wrote:
> [...]
>>> Not always practical.  A good example is the type size_t.  If a
>>> function takes an argument of type size_t, then the symbol size_t
>>> should be defined, no matter which header the function is being
>>> declared in.
>>
>> Why?  One can use a type without a name for such type.
> 
> Convenience and existing practice.  Sure, an implementation of
> <string.h> could provide a declaration of memcpy() without making
> size_t visible, but what would be the point?

Cleanliness of definitions?  Consistency?  Fragment that you
replaced by [...] contained a proposal:

>>>> Every identifier should be declared in exactly one home header,
>>>> and no other header should provide that definition.

That would be pretty clean and consistent rule: if you need some
standard symbol, then you should include corresponding header.

Tim claimed that this in not practical.  Clearly C standard changed
previous practice about headers, so existing practice is _not_
a practical problem with adapting such proposal.  With current
standard and practice one frequently needs symbols from several
headers, so "convenience" is also not a practival problem with
such proposal.  People not interested in clean name space can
define private "all.h" which includes all standard C headers
and possibly other things that they need, so for them overhead
is close to zero.

-- 
                              Waldek Hebisch