(...or better not!) I stumbled over this concession to Pascal programmers: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Nested-Functions.html Test case: https://github.com/JoliOS/grub2/blob/master/util/grub-fstest.c#L211 Note that this feature is not used in the original grub code: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/grub.git/tree/util/grub-fstest.c#n240