The article explains the parsing challenges of C's sizeof operator, which accepts either a unary expression or a parenthesized type name. Compound literals and postfix operators complicate naive parsing approaches, and combining unary expression and cast parsing can lead to ambiguity, as in sizeof(int)+1 being an addition rather than a cast.
Background
C's sizeof operator has a unique grammar that allows both expressions and type names as operands, creating parsing ambiguities that compiler writers must carefully handle.
- Source
- Lobsters
- Published
- Aug 2, 2026 at 02:01 PM
- Score
- 6.0 / 10