Is there a way to print out the type of a variable/pointer in C?

Question

I want to print out (or otherwise ascertain) the type of some variable in my program. Is there a good way to do it? By good, I mean a way that works, even if it means intentionally throwing compiler errors.

For example:

client.c:55: error: incompatible types in assignment 

is the error I'm getting right now. What I WANT is it to tell me something like:

client.c:55: error: attempting to assign type struct a to type struct b 

or a function that I can use like so:

printf(gettype(x)); 

which would output:

struct b 

Answer 1

I have just discovered how to do this.

printf("%d", variable); 

If variable is not an int then gcc -Wall will complain that the types don't match - and will print out the type of the variable, which is exactly what you are looking for.