1.5. Terminology
In C programs there are two distinct types of things: things used to hold
values and things that are functions. Instead of having to refer to them
jointly with a clumsy phrase that maintains the distinction, we think that
it's useful to call them both loosely ‘objects’. We do quite a lot of
that later, because it's often the case that they follow more or less the
same rules. Beware though, that this isn't quite what the Standard uses the
term to mean. In the Standard, an ‘object’ is explicitly a region of
allocated storage that is used to represent a value and a function is
something different; this leads to the Standard often having to say
‘… functions and objects …’. Because we don't think
that it leads to too much confusion and does improve the readability of the
text in most cases, we will continue to use our looser interpretation of
object to include functions and we will explicitly use the terms ‘data
objects’ and ‘functions’ when the distinction is appropriate.
Be prepared to find this slight difference in meaning if you do read the
Standard.
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