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The declarations introduce functions, variables and types. C functions are akin to the subroutines of Fortran or the procedures of Pascal. A definition is a special type of declaration. A variable definition sets aside storage and possibly initializes it, a function definition provides its body.
Various rules in the C standard make unsigned char the basic type used for arrays suitable to store arbitrary non-bit-field objects: its lack of padding bits and trap representations, the definition of object representation, [7] and the possibility of aliasing. [12] The actual size and behavior of floating-point types also vary by implementation.
In C and C++, volatile is a type qualifier, like const, and is a part of a type (e.g. the type of a variable or field). The behavior of the volatile keyword in C and C++ is sometimes given in terms of suppressing optimizations of an optimizing compiler: 1- don't remove existing volatile reads and writes, 2- don't add new volatile reads and writes, and 3- don't reorder volatile reads and writes.
In an imperative programming language and in many object-oriented programming languages, apart from assignments and subroutine calls, keywords are often used to identify a particular statement, e.g. if, while, do, for, etc. Many languages treat keywords as reserved words, including Ada, C, C++, COBOL, Java, and Pascal. The number of reserved ...
The static keyword (static and extern are mutually exclusive), applied to the definition of an external variable, changes this a bit: the variable can only be accessed by the functions in the same module where it was defined. But it is possible for a function in the same module to pass a reference (pointer) of the variable to another function ...
Declarations either define new types using keywords such as struct, union, and enum, or assign types to and perhaps reserve storage for new variables, usually by writing the type followed by the variable name. Keywords such as char and int specify built-in types.
For variables, definitions assign values to an area of memory that was reserved during the declaration phase. For functions, definitions supply the function body. While a variable or function may be declared many times, it is typically defined once (in C++, this is known as the One Definition Rule or ODR).
static is a reserved word in many programming languages to modify a declaration. The effect of the keyword varies depending on the details of the specific programming language, most commonly used to modify the lifetime (as a static variable) and visibility (depending on linkage), or to specify a class member instead of an instance member in classes.