Question

I was just fooling around in Xcode and I discovered that the following statement compiles and it doesn’t even raise a warning let alone an error:

static static static int static long static var[5];

What’s up with that? Does this make it super-DUPER static? 🙂

All joking aside, why does the compiler permit repeating the static modifier? Is there actually a reason to allow people to do this or were the people who wrote the compiler too lazy to make this raise an error?

Answer 1

I’m not an Objective-C developer, but does the language allow for an arbitrary ordering of modifiers (e.g. static volatile extern)? If so, then it’s probably a benign bug in the compiler that after reading a modifier (“static” in this case) returns to a state where it accepts any modifier terminal again, and will do until it encounters the variable’s type. Continual static declarations wouldn’t contradict any prior modifiers so it wouldn’t raise any errors; so based on this I would expect volatile volatile volatile int x; to also work.