Question

I might be going insane, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this in c++ (though my reference code is in C). Why is there a static on the return value of the code here and what impact does it have? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a static function outside class scope (but obviously C doesn’t have classes and this probably has a different syntactical meaning).

/* just like strlen(3), but cap the number of bytes we count */
static size_t strnlen(const char *s, size_t max) {
    register const char *p;
    for(p = s; *p && max--; ++p);
    return(p - s);
}

From http://www.zeuscat.com/andrew/software/c/strnlen.c.

Answer 1

the static is not on the return type but on the function definition.

static functions don’t have external linkage basically they are only visible to other functions in the same file.