UC3M

A function may be defined with the “static” prefix. When a function is declared as static, it can only be invoked from the file in which it is defined. This mechanism can be seen as a primitive form of restricting the access to a function, although it is still far from the three level mechanism (private, public, protected) present in Java.

During the development of large applications, a policy is typically enforced with respect to the use of prototypes. For example, to allow the use of any function in a file anywhere in that file, the prototypes of all the functions are placed at the top of the file. The following example shows an example of this policy:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

/* Global functions */
int function1(int p1, float p2, int table[], int size);
void function2();
struct data *function3(char *name, char* lastname, int status);
/* Local functions */
static void check(int table[], int size);
static struct data *duplicate(struct data *d1);

/* Definitions */
....