Today one of my coworkers ran into this snippet of code:

namespace N {
    struct sockaddr *Foo();
}

#include <sys/socket.h>

int main() {
    struct sockaddr *x = N::Foo();
}

Clang complains:

prog.cpp: In function 'int main()':
prog.cpp:8:33: error: cannot convert 'N::sockaddr*' to 'sockaddr*' in initialization
     struct sockaddr *x = N::foo();
                                 ^
prog.cpp:2:12: note: class type 'N::sockaddr' is incomplete
     struct sockaddr *foo();
            ^~~~~~~~

Moving the #include above namespace N makes the compiler Do The Right Thing, of course. The question is, why do we allow the compiler to do the wrong thing in the first place?

Wouldn’t it be nice if Clang produced a warning any time you implicitly declared a brand-new struct type inside the declaration of some larger entity, such as a function or variable declaration? It’s a cinch you didn’t mean to do that; yet compilers currently accept it without question.