Why is Xcode allowing me to declare C variables anywhere? - c

Question

I created a basic C project in Xcode and modified the starter code in main.c slightly. I also went into the build settings and told it to use ANSI-C. Here's the code I have:
int main(int argc, const char * argv[])
{
// a statement!
printf("Hello, World!\n");
// shouldn't this cause a compiler error?
// the variable isn't declared at the top of the scope.
int x;
x += 10;
return 0;
}
Obviously, it doesn't do much, but I expected the variable declaration to produce a compiler error (since older versions of C require variable declarations at the beginning of the scope, before other statements). However, Xcode happily compiles it and runs it with neither an error or warning.
I might be making a dumb mistake somewhere, but I'm trying to understand why this code compiles. I've read that C99 and C11 allow you to declare variables anywhere, so this would work, but I explicitly set the project to use ANSI-C. Is this just the way Apple's LLVM compiler works? Or am I missing something elsewhere?

Answer 1

TL;DR You need to add -pedantic (or -Wdeclaration-after-statement) to -ansi to get the warning you want.
Somewhat to my surprise, both clang (from Apple XCode 7.2) and gcc (from GCC 5.3.0, which I built), accept the code when compiled with either -std=c90 or -ansi even though it is not strictly compliant with C90.
However, both complain when told to be -pedantic.
$ clang -ansi -c xyz.c
$ clang -std=c90 -c xyz.c
$ gcc -std=c90 -c xyz.c
$ which gcc
/opt/gcc/v5.3.0/bin/gcc
$ gcc -std=c90 -pedantic -c xyz.c
xyz.c: In function ‘main’:
xyz.c:7:5: warning: ISO C90 forbids mixed declarations and code [-Wdeclaration-after-statement]
int x;
^
$ clang -pedantic -std=c90 -c xyz.c
xyz.c:7:9: warning: ISO C90 forbids mixing declarations and code [-Wdeclaration-after-statement]
int x;
^
1 warning generated.
$ clang -pedantic -ansi -c xyz.c
xyz.c:7:9: warning: ISO C90 forbids mixing declarations and code [-Wdeclaration-after-statement]
int x;
^
1 warning generated.
$
The file xyz.c is your source code with the comments stripped, #include <stdio.h> added at the top, and int main(void) in place of int main(int argc, char **argv) since the code doesn't use the arguments.
Note that your code has undefined behaviour; incrementing an uninitialized variable is a bad idea.