Question

I am aware of two possible ways to define and use structs:

#1 
struct person
{
    char name[32];
    int age;
};

struct person dmr = {"Dennis Ritchie", 70};

#2
typedef struct
{
    char name[32];
    int age;
} person;

person dmr = {"Dennis Ritchie", 70};

The interesting property of the first way is that both the type and the variable can have the same name:

struct person person = {"Sam Persson", 50};

Is that idiomatic in C? Is it guaranteed to work in C++? Or are there corner cases I should be aware of?

Note that I am not interested in pure C++ answers (e.g. “use std::string instead of char[32]“). This is a question about C/C++ compatibility.

Answer 1

struct person person = {"Sam Persson", 50};

It is not idiomatic to use the same identifier for a type and a variable. In Unix, it is typical to use an abbreviated version for the variable name, e.g: struct stat st, struct timeval tv, … the same way fd is a typical name for a file descriptor variable.