Comment by clifflocked

> we all know this, it makes sense, there's no reasonable alternative

There absolutely are reasonable alternate ways to represent ordered data that don't involve templates. The way that C does it makes sense in most cases, and if you are looking at something that you cannot understand, you are looking at bad code.

> "Declaration follows use" immediately goes out the window when faced with typedeffed types being used as the base type

Typedefs are an abstraction. If you create a typedef, it is usually because you only want to handle the data as a whole, passing it to helper functions that remove the typedef. Also, declaration of use does not break down with typedefs:

    typedef char *(*fn)(int, char *);
    fn my_fn;

    char *s = (*my_fn)(0, ""); // Proper use

> "Declaration follows use" is the type level equivalent of taking off your socks before taking off your shoes because that's the order in which you put them on.

Please give me an example of some C code where this is the case.