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An external variable can be accessed by all the functions in all the modules of a program. It is a global variable.For a function to be able to use the variable, a declaration or the definition of the external variable must lie before the function definition in the source code.
Differences between C and C++ linkage and calling conventions can also have subtle implications for code that uses function pointers. Some compilers will produce non-working code if a function pointer declared extern "C" points to a C++ function that is not declared extern "C". [22] For example, the following code:
External linkage, however, is not sufficient for such a variable's use in other files: for a compilation unit to correctly access such a global variable, it will need to know its type. This is accomplished by declaring the variable in each file using the extern keyword. (It will be declared in each file but may be defined in only one.)
In C++, a function defined inline will, if required, emit a function shared among translation units, typically by putting it into the common section of the object file for which it is needed. The function must have the same definition everywhere, always with the inline qualifier. In C++, extern inline is the same as inline.
Weak symbols are not mentioned by the C or C++ language standards; as such, inserting them into code is not very portable. Even if two platforms support the same or similar syntax for marking symbols as weak, the semantics may differ in subtle points, e.g. whether weak symbols during dynamic linking at runtime lose their semantics or not.
In C++, classes can be forward-declared if you only need to use the pointer-to-that-class type (since all object pointers are the same size, and this is what the compiler cares about). This is especially useful inside class definitions, e.g. if a class contains a member that is a pointer (or a reference) to another class.
This is also valid in C++. (C++ 98/03 deprecated this usage in favor of anonymous namespaces, but is no longer deprecated in C++ 11.) Also, C++ implicitly treats any const namespace-scope variable as having internal linkage unless it is explicitly declared extern, unlike C. A name's linkage is related to, but distinct from, its scope. The scope ...
getopt is a system dependent function, and its behavior depends on the implementation in the C library. Some custom implementations like gnulib are available, however. [6]The conventional (POSIX and BSD) handling is that the options end when the first non-option argument is encountered, and that getopt would return -1 to signal that.