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Comment by uecker | Hacker News Reader

C++ had this forever (I assume), but for C this would be a breaking change which we try very hard to avoid.

Could you please give an example of what would break? Perhaps I'm being dense, but it seems a new C standard supporting this would still compile existing code just as C++ can.

In C, it's perfectly legal to do this:

    struct S { ... };
    typedef int S;

That's not valid in C++ (so would be a breaking change in C, if it were to adopt this).

I don't really think changing this in C would break all that much code, but it's definitely not backwards compatible.

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