I tried different websites but I don't get it. Could you explain it in simple english?
"scope" is a namespace of the compiler;
"linkage" is about compiled units.
I explain a bit more: A variable declared in a function has the scope of that function, i.e. it is visible only within that function. A variable declared as static in a source file, can be seen only by the code in that source file (and all included files!). Variables can also have global scope: they can be referred to in a source file, but not declared (allocated) in that source file but declared in another source file.
In stead of "source file" we should say "compilation unit" as it is the C source file being compiled, plus all included files. Scope refers to everything the compiler can "see" in a compilation unit. These are namespaces.
After compilation of a project there are a number of object files, one for each compile unit. Each may refer to variables used that are not declared in the compile unit. The linker must now resolve these references between object files: linkage.
This also holds for functions.
Keep reading on your page (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/teta4z44.aspx). This is talking about visibility of objects between translation units (source files). It first talks about "internal linkage": objects defined as static, unique to the translation unit but available throughout.
Next it talks about "external linkage": a like-level object not declared static. These are shared between translation units.
Finally, "no linkage": an object such as a variable within a function, not declared extern, which is unique to that scope.
If you follow the links on the bottom of the page, it's all explained.
Share what I learned about this issue.
Scope is for the benefit of the compiler, while linkage is for the benefit of the linker.
The compiler uses the scope of an identifier to determine whether or not it's legal to refer to the identifier at a given point in a file. When the compiler translate a source file into object code, it notes which names have external linkage, eventually storing these names in a table inside the object file.
Thus, the linker has access to names with external linkage; names with internal linkage or no linkage are invisible to linker.
(The above text is from book "C programming: A modern approach", which contains an exactly same question).
Related
As of late, I've been trying to work through opaque pointers as a programming concept and one of the main things I've had difficulties with is figuring out what is or isn't available to other files. In a previous question, I failed in trying to create an opaque pointer to a struct and even though the answer explained how to fix that, I still don't quite understand where I went wrong.
I think that if a struct is defined in file2.c, file1.c can use it if both files include header.h which includes a declaration of the struct? That doesn't entirely make sense to me. header.h is used by both files, so I can see how they would access the stuff in it, but I don't understand how they would use it to access each other.
When I started programming, I thought it was pretty straight forwards, where you have program files, they can't access anything in each other, and those program files can #include header files with definitions and declarations in them (e.g. file1.c has access to variables/functions/etc. defined in header.h). Turns out I was wrong and things are quite a bit more complicated.
So from what I can tell, func() defined in header.h can be used by file1.c without being declared in file1.c, if file1.c includes header.h. As opposed to var defined in header.h which needs to be declared in file1.c with the extern keyword? And I think if var is defined in file2.c, file1.c can use it if it extern declares it, even if neither file1.c nor file2.c include header.h?
I apologize if the previous paragraphs makes no sense, I'm having quite a bit of difficulty with trying to describe something that confuses me. By all means, please edit this if you are able to fix mistakes or whatnot.
Books and webpages don't seem to help at all. They end up giving me misconceptions because I already don't understand something and draw the wrong conclusions, or they bring up concepts that throw me off even more.
What I'm looking what I'm looking for is an answer that lays this all down in front of me. For example 'this can access this under these circumstances', 'this cannot access this'.
Functions defined in one .c file can use anything defined in another .c file except for those things which are marked as static. Functions and global variables which are marked as static cannot be accessed from other translation units.
Whether something is declared in a header file or not doesn't really matter--you can declare functions locally in the same .c file which calls them if you want.
Your question asks about “access” at several points, but I do not think that is what you mean to use. Any object or function can be accessed (for an object: read or written, for a function: called) from anywhere as long as a pointer to it is provided in some way). I think what you mean to ask is what names are available.
Any declaration that is outside of a function is an external declaration. In this use of “external” in the C standard, it simply means outside of a function. (That includes a function declaration or definition; although it is declaring or defining a function, it is not inside itself or any other function declaration, so it is outside of any function.)
Any identifier for an object or function with an external declaration has either internal linkage or external linkage. If it is first declared with static, it has internal linkage (and may be later declared with extern, but that will not change the linkage). Otherwise, it has external linkage.
Any identifier with external linkage will refer to the same object or function in all translation units (provided other rules of the C standard are satisfied—a program can do various things that will result in behavior not defined by the C standard).
Thus your answer is: The name of any object or function that is (a) defined outside of any function and (b) not initially declared with static is available to be linked to from other translation units.
Some technicalities that may be of interested:
What people think of as a variable is two things: an identifier (the name) and an object (a region of memory that stores the value).
Identifiers have scope, which is where they are visible in the source code. Identifiers declared outside functions have file scope; they are visible for the rest of the translation unit. Identifiers declared inside functions have various other types of scope: function scope, function prototype scope, and block scope.
You may sometimes seem people refer to global scope or external scope, but these are misnomers; they are not terms used in the C standard.
Linkage is related to scope and is sometimes confused with it, but linkage is a different concept: Two identical identifiers declared in different places can be made to refer to the same thing. Those identifiers have different scopes, notably one having file scope in one translation unit and the other having file scope in a different translation unit. Since each translation unit is compiled separately, the compiler generates code regarding each identifier separately. When the object modules are linked, then the code is bounded together, causing the separate identifiers to refer to the same object or function.
Identifiers can be declared with extern inside functions, but these can only link to objects or functions defined elsewhere; external definitions cannot appear inside functions.
External linkage provides scoping across compilation units.
Theoretically, can using external linkage replace including header files where they are used?
I don't mean to do that, and just ask for better understanding the concepts.
Conversely, can including header files where the declarations in them are used replace external linkage?
Do external linkage and header files have a lot of overlap in their use cases?
Thanks.
Linkage is a property of identifiers. The details of the declaration(s) of an identifier determine its linkage within the scope of that declaration, thus you don't have linkage (or identifiers in the first place) without declarations.
Header files are primarily a way to share declarations, so no, external linkage is not an alternative to header files. The two aren't even really comparable. Indeed, the identifiers declared in a header file typically do include some with external linkage, so external linkage and header files are not mutually exclusive.
Now, you can put whatever declarations you want directly in your source files, instead of (or in addition to) obtaining them by #includeing headers. This includes not only declarations of of identifiers with external linkage but also declarations of identifiers that always have no linkage, such as typedef names, enums, and structure tags. Perhaps that's what you meant. The practice scales poorly, however, even when you have only a handful of source files among which to share declarations.
I apologize if this is a beginner's question, but after working in C for a bit, I finally would like a bit of clarification on exactly what kind of files/functions are available to a function.
I understand we can explicitly include other files with the #include macro like so:
#include bar.c
But what about files that are in the same directory? Let's say we have the following file structure:
src-
|
a.c
b.c
And let's say a.c has the function "foo()" and b.c has "bar()"
Would I be able to call bar() within a.c even without explicitly including b.c in the header file?
And what about in sub-directories such as the following:
src-
|
a.c
|
someFolder-
|
b.c
Would I still be able to access bar() in a.c?
Basically, how exactly is the scope of functions (without including them in headers) defined?
You are confusing scope with linkage.
The term scope descibes if an identifier is visible to the compiler in a given context. The broadest scope known to the C language is file scope which means that the identifier is visible from the point it is declared to the end of the translation unit after preprocessing. You can make any identifier visible/known by declaring it, but making an identifier visible does not mean that refering to the identifier refers to the thing it refers to in another file.
The term linkage describes how two identifiers refer to the same thing. There are three levels of linkage: with no linkage, each identifier with the name refers to a different thing. With internal linkage, each identifier within the same translation unit refers to the same thing. With external linkage, each identifier in the whol program refers to the same thing. For two identifiers in two translation units to refer to the same thing, you need to declare both of them to have external linkage.
This is independent of how the declaration is obtained. There is no difference in writing int foo() in a common header file to writing the same line in both source files. In either case, all identifiers refer to the same foo() as functions have external linkage unless explicitly declared to have internal linkage with the static type specifier.
It is also independent of how your source code is laid out. As long as all translation units are linked into the same binary, you can call all functions with external linkage in each translation unit.
Depends on whether you are linking these into one binary or not.
If linking - then yes, functions can be called with implicit declaration.
Common pattern in this case is making a header(s) file with all declarations, including *.c files is usually not preferred, since #include is just textual inclusion of file contents
#include (a preprocessor directive, not a macro, BTW) has a configurable list of directories it searches.
If you use the #include "something.h" form (as compared to the angle bracket form for including system headers), the first directory in the list is the directory of the including file.
Although #include does a simple textual inclusion so it is technically possible to include any text file, c files are almost never included.
In C, you usually compile c files separately into object files and link them together, and what you do include is header files which consist of declarations, which represent interfaces of the other object files which your current compilation unit otherwise wouldn't see.
Check out http://www.cs.bu.edu/teaching/c/separate-compilation/ or another article on that topic.
The forward slash "/" should work in this case.
If you can include foo.h without problem, this means the directory (say, C:\DIRFOO) is predefined in the "include" directive of the compiler. So, another file (say bar.h) in a sub directory (say, C:\DIRFOO\DIRBAR) can be included via #include <DIRBAR/bar.h>.
I'm using eclipse indigo, gcc and cdt in a project. If two functions in separate source files share names (regardless of return type or parameters), eclipse flags a redefinition error. This isn't a huge issue regarding this project given I can easily rename these functions, and I'm well aware of wrappers if it were. Although this isn't a critical issue, it does make me think I'm not understanding the c build process. What occurs during the build process in which a program structure like this would cause issue?
Here's some more info. on the situation, and where my understanding is so far -- not necessary to answer the question, although there must be a hole in my understanding.
In this case, the two functions are intended to be used only locally, as such their prototypes are not given in the .h interface, and for the sake of my point, neither are defined 'static'.
Neither of these source files are being included anywhere in the project, so they shouldn't be sharing any compilation units. With that in consideration, I would have assumed that the neither source file is aware of the presence of the other, and the compiler would have no problem indexing the two functions, as the separate files would allow for proper distinguishing between the two during linking -- so long as they weren't included in the same compilation unit.
I noticed that statically defining either instance of the function declaration removes the error. I remember reading at some point that every function not declared static is global -- although given these functions are not a part of the .h interface, the practical example in which including the .h interface doesn't allow for the including program to reference all .c functions would indicate "hiding" these functions would be of no issue.
What am I overlooking?
Some insight would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
This is the concept of "linkage". Every function and variable in C has a linkage type, one of "external", "internal", and "none". (Only variables can have no linkage.)
Functions have external linkage by default, which means that they can be called by name from any compilation unit (where "compilation unit" roughly means one source file and all the headers it includes). This can be expressed explicitly by declaring them extern, or it can be overridden by declaring them static. Functions declared static have internal linkage, meaning they can be referenced by name only from other functions in the same compilation unit.
No two external functions anywhere in the same program can have the same name, regardless of header files, but static functions in different compilation units may have the same name. A static function may have the same name as an external function, too -- then the name resolves to the static function within its compilation unit, and to the external function elsewhere. These restrictions make sense, for otherwise it would be possible for a function call to be ambiguous.
Header files don't factor into the linkage equation at all. They are primarily a vehicle for sharing declarations, but a function's linkage depends only on how it is declared, not on where.
I leave discussion of variables' linkage for another time.
It doesn't matter whether one source module includes headers for another. Header files only contain declarations for the purpose of local functions being able to find functions in other modules. It doesn't mean that functions not declared don't exist from the perspective of that module.
When everything gets linked together, anything not specifically defined to be local to one source module (i.e. static) has to have a unique name across all linked components.
remember reading at some point that every function not declared static is global
Having understood this you got the main point and reason for the behaviour observed.
.h files are not known to the linker, after pre-processing there are only translation units left (typically a .c file with all includes merged in), from which .o files are compiled.
There are no interfaces on language level in C.
Neither of these source files are being included anywhere in the project, so they shouldn't be sharing any compilation units.
Declare those functions as static. This is the only way to "hide" a function from the linker "inside" a translation unit.
C doesn't "mangle" function names the way C++ or Java do (since C doesn't support function polymorphism).
For example, in C++, the functions
void foo( void );
void foo( int x );
void foo( int x, double y );
have their names "mangled" into the unique symbols1
_Z3fooid
_Z3fooi
_Z3foov
which is how overloaded function/method calls are disambiguated at the machine level.
C doesn't do that; instead, the linker sees two different function definitions using the same symbol and yaks because it has no way to disambiguate the two.
1. This is what happens on my system, anyway
I have a little project in which I named two same name function in two different source file, but while I building the project, the compiler failed with 'func_name already defined in filename.obj'.
Why could not I have two functions with the same name in two different source files? I thought the function should be local to the source file only if when we declared it in the header file will it become global.
And except for changing the filename, are there any other elegant solution to duplicated function name in the C programming language?
In C, a function has global scope by default. To restrict its scope, use the static keyword to make it private to a the module.
The role of the header file is just to publicize the function along with its signature to other modules.
All global names must (with some caveats) be unique. This makes sense because that name is what is used by the linker to connect a function call to implementation of the function itself.
Names with static and local scope need only be unique within their scope.
Whether some thing is declared in header file or in source file makes absolutely no difference for the compiler. In fact, the compiler proper knows absolutely nothing about any "header files", since header files are embedded into source files by so called preprocessor, which does its work before the compiler proper. By the time the source files (with embedded header files) get to the actual compiler, there's no way to tell what was there originally and what was inserted from header files. The source file with all the header files embedded into it is called translation unit. I.e. the compiler proper works with translation units, not with some "source" or "header" files.
In C language all objects and functions declared at file scope have external linkage by default, which means that they are global, unique for the entire program. So, you thought incorrectly. Functions are not local to one source file only.
If you want to make a function (or an object) local to a single translation unit, you have to take some explicit steps. You have to declare it as static. Declaring it as static will give it internal linkage, which essentially means that it becomes internal to its translation unit.
Declaring your functions static will only work if both of them really have to be local to their own translation units. If this is not the case, i.e. if at least one of the functions should be a globally accessible (linkable) function, then you have no other choice but to rename one of functions.
Why could not I have two function with the same name in two differenct source file?
Because the linker needs to know which is meant when you reference it.
Imagine that a.h and b.h both declare my_function(). The compiler generates code for both. Now, imagine that c.c calls my_function() - how does the linker know which of the two versions of the function should be called?
Declare the function static to make it local to the file. In C, every identifier name must be unique.
The elegant solution is namespaces introduced in C++. The solution, if there are few calls to func_name is take one, rename it and recompile.
Something hackerous but quick solution might be this:
//In one of the two source files and any file that calls it
//if your functions is something like this
//void func_name(int) { ... }
//Add the following line
#define func_name SOME_UNIQUE_FUNC_NAME