That's what makes C programming fun: doing what the compiler/language people say you shouldn't be doing and seeing if it works anyways. At least, it works on my machine...
Rational built a truly semantic IDE, and the result of that is that if you change a line of source-code somewhere in a huge complicated project, it will know precisely what the consequences of that change are.
Ultimately, this allows it often just recompile that single line.
