Interesting quirks with parsing C

I guess you never really understand something until you try to teach it. I am recently putting together a C parser and am working through a standards compliant specification for the C grammar. Today I got to the part about typedefs.

I was very surprised to understand that grammatically typedef is just a normal type storage class specifier like extern or static.

Example:

typedef int x;

is much similar to

static int x;

There is one nitpick with this that needs to be mentioned though. typedef affects the parsing of following C code. Any bound typedef becomes a valid type specifier, which potentially affects how code is parsed. This means that C grammar can only be parsed in one direction from left to right.

The more you know.