Why does C++ disallow anonymous structs?

Solution 1:

As others have pointed out anonymous unions are permitted in standard C++, but anonymous structs are not.

The reason for this is that C supports anonymous unions but not anonymous structs*, so C++ supports the former for compatibility but not the latter because it's not needed for compatibility.

Furthermore, there's not much use to anonymous structs in C++. The use you demonstrate, to have a struct containing three floats which can be referred to either by .v[i], or .x, .y, and .z, I believe results in undefined behavior in C++. C++ does not allow you to write to one member of a union, say .v[1], and then read from another member, say .y. Although code that does this is not uncommon it is not actually well defined.

C++'s facilities for user-defined types provide alternative solutions. For example:

struct vector3 {
  float v[3];
  float &operator[] (int i) { return v[i]; }
  float &x() { return v[0]; }
  float &y() { return v[1]; }
  float &z() { return v[2]; }
};

_{* C11 apparently adds anonymous structs, so a future revision to C++ may add them.}

Solution 2:

I'll say, you can clean up your vector3 declaration by just using a union

union vector3 {
  struct { float x, y, z; } ;
  float v[3] ;
} ;

Sure, anonymous structures was an MSVC extension. But ISO C11 permits it now, and gcc allows it, and so does Apple's llvm compiler.

Why in C11 and not C++11? I'm not sure, but practically speaking most (gcc++, MSVC++ and Apple's C++ compiler) C++ compilers support them.

Solution 3:

Not sure what you mean. Section 9.5 of the C++ spec, clause 2:

A union of the form

union { member-specification } ;

is called an anonymous union; it defines an unnamed object of unnamed type.

You can do things like this too:

void foo()
{
  typedef
  struct { // unnamed, is that what you mean by anonymous?
    int a;
    char b;
  } MyStructType; // this is more of a "C" style, but valid C++ nonetheless

  struct { // an anonymous struct, not even typedef'd
    double x;
    double y;
  } point = { 1.0, 3.4 };
}

Not always very useful... although sometimes useful in nasty macro definitions.