Yes, I believe there was a variant where struct members had global identifier scope. This means that in order to compile x->mem or x.mem, you don't need to know

Yes, I believe there was a variant where struct members had global identifier scope. This means that in order to compile x->mem or x.mem, you don't need to know the type of x at all: mem alone tells you the offset to use. In this context, the distinction between -> and . matters because you don't have the type to tell whether an indirection is needed. It's surprising that unified -> and . wasn't widely added as a compiler extension. Most compilers already do the adjustment as part of error recovery, and most of them accept much more dubious type errors by default (things that never were part of any C standard). GDB handles it just fine, though.