Well, if your code is C++, rename the file to cpp or cxx or cc, but "nothing in the code that wouldn't compile under C++" is not really the same.
If your code is C, that is iso9899:1990 unless you specify something different. In that case, it should be C90 and not something else. On the other hand, if you need C99 features, you must use a compiler that supports this language revision (not all do), and you must tell the compiler.
GCC supports C99 if you add -std=c99 to the command line.
Note that some broken compilers (such as Microsoft) support C++ comments despite not properly supporting C99. That's because they use the C++ compiler (with some tweaks) to compile C, which accidentially works, although it shouldn't.