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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.
For these reasons, for C++ code to call a C function foo(), the C++ code must prototype foo() with extern "C". Likewise, for C code to call a C++ function bar(), the C++ code for bar() must be declared with extern "C". A common practice for header files to maintain both C and C++ compatibility is to make its declaration be extern "C" for the ...
Such extern declarations are often placed in a shared header file, since it is common practice for all .c files in a project to include at least one .h file: the standard header file errno.h is an example, making the errno variable accessible to all modules in a project.
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 ...
Translation units define a scope, roughly file scope, and functioning similarly to module scope; in C terminology this is referred to as internal linkage, which is one of the two forms of linkage in C. Names (functions and variables) declared outside of a function block may be visible either only within a given translation unit, in which case they are said to have internal linkage – they are ...
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 the event that header file is included a second time, the #include guard will prevent the actual code within that header from being compiled. An alternative to #include guards is #pragma once . This non-standard but commonly supported directive among C and C++ compilers has the same purpose as an #include guard, but has less code and does ...