So I can do stuff like:
char *crazy = malloc(strlen(crazy) + 1); /* make crazy exactly as big as it ought to be. */
This has the effect that you can't shadow a variable with a variable defined in terms of the shadowee.
Code like this:
int t = 0;
{
int t = t + 1;
printf("t %d\n", t);
}
Doesn't print out 1 unless you're lucky. While this seems like a crazy thing to do, I find it's a pretty common idiom in ML (where you don't need to create a nested scope to shadow) for when you're functionally updating something.
A C analogy might be something like, for example,
p = sprintf(buf, [...]);
p = sprintf(p, [...]);
p = sprintf(p, [...]);
where mutating p isn't really the goal.
