Well, when I learned C a long long time ago, they told me that local variable declarations had to be made at the beginning of each scope such as a function scope (I don't recall if this rule included the "if" scope in your example).
I think that because this is a pure C project all the C++ rules of allowing "lazy" declarations are not valid. Anyway, if it is indeed the reason that my compiler complains, we have nothing to worry about. I don't think that saving the stack space is critical to the performance of this code.
Martin: OK, it's just one file, just name your favourite method (e-mail /other). I can't get into your irc server for some obscure reason, so DCC isn't an option.