Linkage (software)

In programming languages, particularly the compiled ones like C, C++, and D, linkage describes how names can or can not refer to the same entity throughout the whole program or one single translation unit.An identifier declared in different scopes or in the same scope more than once can be made to refer to the same object or function by a process called linkage. In programming languages, particularly the compiled ones like C, C++, and D, linkage describes how names can or can not refer to the same entity throughout the whole program or one single translation unit. The static keyword is used in C to restrict the visibility of a function or variable to its translation unit. 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 of a name is the part of a translation unit where it is visible. For instance, a name with global scope (which is the same as file-scope in C and the same as the global namespace-scope in C++) is visible in any part of the file. Its scope will end at the end of the translation unit, whether or not that name has been given external or internal linkage.