"Accidental" forward declaration of enum without compiler warning?

[CodeMonkey]

Hi,

I am running CodeWarrior IDE 5.7.0 Build 2211 with an S12XE processor.

Consider this code:

enum MyEnumDef { ALARM, SHUTDOWN };

struct MyStructDef {

  enum MyEnumDefS MyEnumDeclaration;

};

struct MyStructDef MyStructDeclaration;

and later in the code in a function:

MyStructDeclaration.MyEnumDeclaration = ALARM;

Please note the typo when declaring MyEnumDeclaration within the struct! The compiler eats this without any complaint. Why is that? It seems like it does not matter how I declare the enum within the struct. I can declare it as "yadiyadiblabla" and the compiler does not care. Same code in Code Composer produces a "Forward declaration of enum type is non-standard" warning. Is this expected behavior?

Thanks,

Chris

[CompilerGuru · Accepted solution]

A warning would be nice to have, but the ANSI-C standard is rather relaxed about enums :smileysad:.
That's one of the places C++ is more strict in its type system.

Daniel