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From: tj@alliant.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards,comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Motivation behind a particular piece of code in cpp
Message-ID: <917@alliant.Alliant.COM>
Date: Thu, 3-Dec-87 15:06:33 EST
Article-I.D.: alliant.917
Posted: Thu Dec  3 15:06:33 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 6-Dec-87 22:09:20 EST
References: <981@gumby.UUCP>
Reply-To: tj@alliant.UUCP (Tom Jaskiewicz)
Organization: Alliant Computer Systems, Littleton, MA
Lines: 21
Keywords: cpp, static, STATIC
Xref: utgpu comp.unix.wizards:5381 comp.lang.c:5408

In article <981@gumby.UUCP> uday@mips.UUCP (Uday Kurkure) writes:
>   I do not understand the motivation behind a following declaration
>   found in the sources of cpp.
>
>     #define STATIC
>
>     Then there are various declartions of the sort
>     STATIC char ch.
>
>    If STATIC is defined to be null, why would one use it in declarations ?

I use STATIC declarations like this in my own code to indicate variables
and routines that could be declared static.  That is, I could #define
STATIC to be static and the code would still work, because there are no
references to STATIC variables outside of the source file.

The reason I don't declare such things to be static is that global
symbols are useful for adb and gprof.

So don't think of STATIC as null; it's really a comment masquerading as
code.