Question

Just out of curiosity: if I have nested scopes, like in this sample C++ code

using namespace std;

int v = 1; // global

int main (void)
{
    int v = 2; // local
    {
        int v = 3; // within subscope
        cout << "subscope: " << v << endl;
        // cout << "local: " << v << endl; 
        cout << "global: " << ::v << endl;
    }
    cout << "local: " << v << endl;

    cout << "global: " << ::v << endl;

}

Is there any way to access the variable v with the value 2 from the “intermediate” scope (neither global nor local)?

Answer 1

You can declare a new reference as an alias like so

int main (void)
{
    int v = 2; // local 
    int &vlocal = v;
    {
        int v = 3; // within subscope
        cout << "local: " << vlocal  << endl; 
    }
}

But I would avoid this practice this altogether. I have spent hours debugging such a construct because a variable was displayed in debugger as changed because of scope and I couldn’t figure out how it got changed.