How is it legal to reference an undefined type inside a structure?

Question

As part of answering another question, I came across a piece of code like this, which gcc compiles without complaint.

typedef struct {
    struct xyz *z;
} x         


        

Answer 1

As the warning says in the second case, struct NOTHING_LIKE_xyz is an incomplete type, like void or arrays of unknown size. An incomplete type can only appear in a struct as a type pointed to (C17 6.7.2.1:3), with an exception for arrays of unknown size that are allowed as the last member of a struct, making the struct itself an incomplete type in this case. The code that follows cannot dereference any pointer to an incomplete type (for good reason).

Incomplete types can offer some datatype encapsulation of sorts in C... The corresponding paragraph in http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/pa-ctypes1/ seems like a good explanation.