Type macros and friends

[Johan Rydberg]

Hi,

I was browsing through the libl4 headers earlier today, and got to
thinking about constructs like the following:

typedef _L4_RAW (_L4_api_version_t, _L4_STRUCT1 ({
  _L4_BITFIELD4
    (_L4_word_t,
     _L4_BITFIELD (__pad1, 16),

     /* The subversion or revision.  */
     _L4_BITFIELD (subversion, 8),

     /* The interface version.  */
     _L4_BITFIELD (version, 8),
                  
     _L4_BITFIELD_64 (__pad2, 32));
})) __L4_api_version_t;

Which results more or less in a union that looks like:

  union foo
  {
    int raw;
    struct {
      int x : 16;
      int y : 16;
    };
  };

This make "x" and "y" visible in the "foo" scope.  For example:

  union foo foo = { .raw = X };
  printf ("%x\n", foo.x);

All good, but what if you want to declare a "foo" staticly?  Like this:

  union foo bar =
  {
    .x = 10, .y = 20
  };

In this case "x" and "y" are _NOT_ available in the "foo" scope.  This
is extremely limiting, from my point of view.  I've tried a gazillion
combinations to try to make a static construct, but have yet to succeed.  

  bar.c:13: unknown field `x' specified in initializer

Anyone got any ideas how a static construct can be created in this
case?

~j