Question

I’ve seen a few function definitions like this recently while playing with GNU Bison:

static VALUE
ripper_pos(self)
    VALUE self;
{
    //code here
}

Why is the type of self outside of the parenthesis? Is this valid C?

Answer 1

Those are old K&R style function parameter declarations, declaring the types of the parameters separately:

int func(a, b, c)
   int a;
   int b;
   int c;
{
  return a + b + c;
}

This is the same as the more modern way to declare function parameters:

int func(int a, int b, int c)
{
  return a + b + c;
}

The “new style” declarations are basically universally preferred.