It makes it difficult to have const locals if you get some sort of dependency chain based on other locals interspersed with other computation. For example, if y

It makes it difficult to have const locals if you get some sort of dependency chain based on other locals interspersed with other computation. For example, if you're a const nazi you can't have code like this: const int x = foo(); // ... const int y = bar(x); and also have your variables all declared at the top. In C++ I'm a const nazi and declare where used to facilitate it, but if I'm writing C that targets the MSVC compiler (C89) where all variables have to be collected at the top of the inner scope I'll relax this as much as I have to.