6.26. Compound Literals
6.26 Compound Literals
A compound literal looks like a cast of a brace-enclosed aggregate initializer list. Its value is an object of the type specified in the cast, containing the elements specified in the initializer. Unlike the result of a cast, a compound literal is an lvalue. ISO C99 and later support compound literals. As an extension, GCC supports compound literals also in C90 mode and in C++, although as explained below, the C++ semantics are somewhat different.
Usually, the specified type of a compound literal is a structure. Assume that struct foo and structure are declared as shown:
struct foo {int a; char b[2];} structure;
Here is an example of constructing a struct foo with a compound literal:
structure = ((stru