Weird function declaration...

[kooma]

While taking a look at nethacks source I've come to across this weird style to declare function (not a prototype):

const char*
artifact_name(name, otyp)
const char *name;
short *otyp;
{
    ...

What sort of devil is this and how to get it work on my own files?

[Deckard]

That's the "old" C-style, before ANSI C. The "present day" equivilant is:

const char *artifact_name( const char *name, short *otyp )
{
}

[Salem]

Which is a really odd way of writing the code, since that should be only found in really old code, and not new code.

I say new code, because it also uses const, which was not part of C until the first ANSI standard (which also introduced function prototypes).