Summary

In this chapter, we explored various storage classes and how memory is allocated. In particular, we clarified automatic memory allocation, or fixed and named memory—the method we've been using exclusively in all chapters prior to this chapter. In addition to automatic memory allocation, we explored static memory allocation. With both of these approaches, we distinguished between internal memory allocation—variables declared within a compound statement or function parameters—and external memory allocation—variables declared outside of any function. For each of these storage classes (automatic internal, automatic external, static internal, and static external memory allocation), we considered the lifetime of the memory—when that memory is destroyed and no longer accessible.

We are now ready to explore in the next chapter a much more flexible storage class, dynamic memory, which is unnamed and can only be accessed via pointer variables...