Dynamic variable declaration in C

Question

I'm a ruby developer and its been long time since I've coded in C. I want to use a datatype in C which behaves like a symbol.

Is this possible?

• Program asks user for name

• User replies - "foobar"

• Program declares an integer with the same name i.e.

  int foobar;
  

Answer 1

Unlike in interpreted languages, C does not have a dictionary of variable names at runtime. There exist no variable names at runtime at all. Hence unfortunately it is impossible to do what you want in C.