You don't have to group variable declarations all at the beginning of a block, as we used to do in C. (I believe that was because they needed to be allocated on the stack by the compiler.) Declare variables when you're about to use them.

Just a little bit of bean counting: C99 allows to declare variables where you need them. Today's C compilers have become smart enough. Here's a silly example:

/tmp>cat c99.c
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

int main(int argc, char ** argv)
{
        char buf1[10];
        snprintf(buf1,sizeof(buf1),"%d",argc);
        int n=0;
        for (int i=0; i<argc; i++) {
                int len=strlen(argv[i]);
                len++;
                n+=len;
        }
        char buf2[10];
        snprintf(buf2,sizeof(buf2),"%d",n);
        char buf3[80];
        snprintf(buf3,sizeof(buf3),"%s args using %s bytes",buf1,buf2)
+;
        puts(buf3);
        return 0;
}

/tmp>CFLAGS="-std=c99 -pedantic -Wall" make c99
cc -std=c99 -pedantic -Wall    c99.c   -o c99

/tmp>./c99 foo bar baz
4 args using 18 bytes

/tmp>
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Alexander