this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2026
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question, why is a declaration not a statement?
from what i could find "because it was designed that way"
For what it's worth, C23 has updated labels to allow being placed before declarations.
Possibly because declarations were originally not statements in C? You could only declare variables at the start of a function, but not assign them to something at the same time.
Not sure why it still wouldn’t be allowed, though, especially if an empty statement can be a statement.
Sometimes saying nothing is the loudest statement you can make. ;-)
And NOP is a perfectly reasonable instruction.
When it's designed to be an expression
That might make sense even if it looks weird. Kinda like a for loop.