4 ms·

Say to strictly enforce modularity, e.g helper functions that can only be accessed within its function. Pascal supports it (at least Turbo Pascal, no idea abou

• Joker_vD 2mo ago
  For a counterpoint, see David R. Hanson's "Is block structure necessary?" (1981) [0] — back in those days, "block structure" meant nested routines with nested scopes — which argues that having instead a proper module system, with explicit control over what's being exported from a module, not only gives a better modularity, decomposition, and encapsulation, but also simplifies both the language's implementation, and the run-time structures it needs (remember displays, and the hardware support for them e.g. x86's ENTER?). Block structure is traditionally considered an a priori requirement for algorithmic program- ming languages. Most new languages since Algol-60 have block structure. Reasons exist, however, to omit the general form of block structure — nested procedure definitions in which references to identifiers defined in outer procedures are permitted — from programming languages, especially those intended for systems programming applications. This paper reviews the concept of block structure and considers its advantages and disadvantages. It concludes that, in many cases, a module facility is superior to block structure and should be considered in lieu of block structure in future languages. [0] https://drh.github.io/documents/blockstructure.pdf https://drh.github.io/documents/blockstructure.pdf
• kccqzy 2mo ago
  The traditional way of doing this in C is simply static functions. Every .c file has exactly one non-static function and all the other helper functions are static.
  • deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]