CODEWITHSUNDEEP
cvisual-studio-2010syntaxide
CJ McAllister
CJ McAllister

Reputation: 331

Using pre-C99 syntax in Visual Studio 2010

I'm working with a rather old codebase, and it's all pre-C99. Therefore, there is no bool type, but rather a BOOLEAN enum. I'm a young gun, so I like VS 2010, but it's not playing particularly well with the old codebase. I guess it's using MSVC2010 to do its in-line error highlighting, and I'm also guessing MSVC2010 conforms to the C99 standard. I could be wrong about this, but in any case, it highlights "errors" when I assign BOOLEAN variables with a boolean expression. I'll give a simple example:

typedef enum boolean_tag {FALSE, TRUE} BOOLEAN;
BOOLEAN test = FALSE;
test = 1 == 1;

In the VS2010 editor, the = would be error-highlighted, and on mouseover will note that a value of type bool cannot be assigned to an entity of type BOOLEAN. Since pre-C99 has no concept of a bool, this should simply be an assignment of enum values, and therefore not an error.

So, my question is: is there a way to tell VS2010 to use pre-C99 syntax/error-checking? Or alternatively, and this is a stretch, have it use another compiler altogether for these functions?

Thanks.

EDIT: Corrected MSVC2010 assumption

Upvotes: 0

Views: 343

Answers (1)

Lundin
Lundin

Reputation: 215245

Some things to consider:

  • Visual Studio is a C++ compiler and therefore not ideal for compiling strictly conforming C programs.
  • Visual Studio does not conform well to any version of the C standard. It certainly does not follow or implement the C99 standard.
  • In C++ the expression 1 == 1 evaluates to true of type bool.
  • In C, any version of the standard, 1 == 1 evaluates to the value 1 of type int.

Visual Studio complains because you are trying to store a bool in an enum, which is not fine in C++, a language with somewhat strong typing. In the C language there are no such restrictions.

The answer to your question is: you are getting these problems because you try to compile a C program in a compiler for another programming language.

Upvotes: 3

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