External Variable
In the C programming language, an external variable is a variable defined outside any function block. On the other hand, a local (automatic) variable is a variable defined inside a function block. Definition, declaration and the extern keyword To understand how external variables relate to the extern keyword, it is necessary to know the difference between defining and declaring a variable. When a variable is ''defined'', the compiler allocates memory for that variable and possibly also initializes its contents to some value. When a variable is ''declared'', the compiler requires that the variable be defined elsewhere. The declaration informs the compiler that a variable by that name and type exists, but the compiler does not need to allocate memory for it since it is allocated elsewhere. The extern keyword means "declare without defining". In other words, it is a way to explicitly declare a variable, or to force a declaration without a definition. It is also possible to expli ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
C Programming Language
''The C Programming Language'' (sometimes termed ''K&R'', after its authors' initials) is a computer programming book written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the latter of whom originally designed and implemented the language, as well as co-designed the Unix operating system with which development of the language was closely intertwined. The book was central to the development and popularization of the C programming language and is still widely read and used today. Because the book was co-authored by the original language designer, and because the first edition of the book served for many years as the ''de facto'' standard for the language, the book was regarded by many to be the authoritative reference on C. History C was created by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs in the early 1970s as an augmented version of Ken Thompson's B. Another Bell Labs employee, Brian Kernighan, had written the first C tutorial, and he persuaded Ritchie to coauthor a book on the language. Ker ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Pascal (programming Language)
Pascal is an imperative and procedural programming language, designed by Niklaus Wirth as a small, efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring. It is named in honour of the French mathematician, philosopher and physicist Blaise Pascal. Pascal was developed on the pattern of the ALGOL 60 language. Wirth was involved in the process to improve the language as part of the ALGOL X efforts and proposed a version named ALGOL W. This was not accepted, and the ALGOL X process bogged down. In 1968, Wirth decided to abandon the ALGOL X process and further improve ALGOL W, releasing this as Pascal in 1970. On top of ALGOL's scalars and arrays, Pascal enables defining complex datatypes and building dynamic and recursive data structures such as lists, trees and graphs. Pascal has strong typing on all objects, which means that one type of data cannot be converted to or interpreted as another without explicit conversi ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
The C Programming Language (book)
''The C Programming Language'' (sometimes termed ''K&R'', after its authors' initials) is a computer programming book written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the latter of whom originally designed and implemented the language, as well as co-designed the Unix operating system with which development of the language was closely intertwined. The book was central to the development and popularization of the C (programming language), C programming language and is still widely read and used today. Because the book was co-authored by the original language designer, and because the first edition of the book served for many years as the ''de facto'' standard for the language, the book was regarded by many to be the authoritative reference on C. History C was created by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs in the early 1970s as an augmented version of Ken Thompson's B (programming language), B. Another Bell Labs employee, Brian Kernighan, had written the first C tutorial, and he persuaded ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Header Files
Many programming languages and other computer files have a directive, often called include (sometimes copy or import), that causes the contents of the specified file to be inserted into the original file. These included files are called copybooks or s. There are over one thousand C library files and they are often used to define the physical layout of program data, pieces of procedural code, and/or forward declarations while promoting encapsulation and the reuse of code or data. Header files In computer programming, a header file is a file that allows programmers to separate certain elements of a program's source code into reusable files. Header files commonly contain forward declarations of classes, subroutines, variables, and other identifiers. Programmers who wish to declare standardized identifiers in more than one source file can place such identifiers in a single header file, which other code can then include whenever the header contents are required. This is to keep the ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Automatic Variable
__NOTOC__ In computer programming, an automatic variable is a local variable which is allocated and deallocated automatically when program flow enters and leaves the variable's scope. The scope is the lexical context, particularly the function or block in which a variable is defined. Local data is typically (in most languages) invisible outside the function or lexical context where it is defined. Local data is also invisible and inaccessible to a ''called'' function,unless it is a nested function, which itself is ''defined'' along that local data but is not deallocated, coming back in scope as the execution thread returns to the caller. Automatic local variables primarily applies to recursive lexically-scoped languages.although they exist in a somewhat similar, but not identical, form also in recursive languages with dynamic scoping, such as older variants of LISP Automatic local variables are normally allocated in the stack frame of the procedure in which they are declared.un ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Global Variable
In computer programming, a global variable is a variable with global scope, meaning that it is visible (hence accessible) throughout the program, unless shadowed. The set of all global variables is known as the ''global environment'' or ''global state.'' In compiled languages, global variables are generally static variables, whose extent (lifetime) is the entire runtime of the program, though in interpreted languages (including command-line interpreters), global variables are generally dynamically allocated when declared, since they are not known ahead of time. In some languages, all variables are global, or global by default, while in most modern languages variables have limited scope, generally lexical scope, though global variables are often available by declaring a variable at the top level of the program. In other languages, however, global variables do not exist; these are generally modular programming languages that enforce a module structure, or class-based object-oriente ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Static (keyword)
In some programming languages such as C (and its close descendants like C++, Objective-C, and Java), static is a reserved word controlling both lifetime (as a static variable) and visibility (depending on ''linkage''). The effect of the keyword varies depending on the details of the specific programming language. Common C/C++ behavior In C and C++, the effect of the static keyword in C depends on where the declaration occurs. static may act as a storage class (not to be confused with classes in object-oriented programming), as can extern, auto and register (which are also reserved words). Every variable and function has one of these storage classes; if a declaration does not specify the storage class, a context-dependent default is used: *extern for all top-level declarations in a source file, *auto for variables declared in function bodies. In these languages, the term "static variable" has two meanings which are easy to confuse: # A variable with the same lifetime as the ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Function Pointer
A function pointer, also called a subroutine pointer or procedure pointer, is a pointer that points to a function. As opposed to referencing a data value, a function pointer points to executable code within memory. Dereferencing the function pointer yields the referenced function, which can be invoked and passed arguments just as in a normal function call. Such an invocation is also known as an "indirect" call, because the function is being invoked ''indirectly'' through a variable instead of ''directly'' through a fixed identifier or address. Function pointers can be used to simplify code by providing a simple way to select a function to execute based on run-time values. Function pointers are supported by third-generation programming languages (such as PL/I, COBOL, Fortran, dBASE dBL, and C) and object-oriented programming languages (such as C++, C#, and D). Simple function pointers The simplest implementation of a function (or subroutine) pointer is as a variable containi ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Mebibyte
The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures. To disambiguate arbitrarily sized bytes from the common 8-bit definition, network protocol documents such as The Internet Protocol () refer to an 8-bit byte as an octet. Those bits in an octet are usually counted with numbering from 0 to 7 or 7 to 0 depending on the bit endianness. The first bit is number 0, making the eighth bit number 7. The size of the byte has historically been hardware-dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the size. Sizes from 1 to 48 bits have been used. The six-bit character code was an often-used implementation in early encoding systems, and computers using six-bit and nine-bit bytes were common in the 1960s. These systems often had memory words ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |