Why would you declare variables in the middle of defining a function?

Question

I have to modify the code for the G722 codec made by the ITU at work.

I contains realy funky function definitions like this one :

    int 
    main (argc         


        

Answer 1

That's very old (pre-1989 standard) function definition syntax. It's still legal for backwards-compatibility's sake, but it's definitely no longer recommended.

As to why anyone would use it, the only reasonable scenarios I can think of are:

• this code is very old and nobody wants to risk breaking it just to bring it up to date;
• it's hosted on a platform for which compilers for later versions of the language were never implemented;