One more and then I'll stop .. I promise.

There appear to be numerous instances of the following design pattern:

struct message_info { uint32_t words[1]; };

Where the above structure is then allocated locally, initialized and returned by a procedure.

Seems like a lot of work to return a uint32_t.

I originally assumed that all/much of this code was generated automatically from Haskell .. so I figured it was some odd corner case in the translator. Subsequent discussions, however, have suggested that this assumption is false and that the code was actually written by hand.

I could understand using structures to present a unique, statically checkable procedure type signature .. but I can't rationalize the use of the single element array.

So .. is there a reason for this curious design pattern?

Thanks, Dave