Take a look at the program below. We have a void function named favorite_animal() and main() with a few statements inside.

#include <iostream>

std::string sea_animal = "manatee";

void favorite_animal(std::string best_animal) {

  std::string animal = best_animal;
  std::cout << "Best animal: " << animal << "\n";

}

int main() {

  favorite_animal("jaguar");

  std::cout << sea_animal << "\n";
  std::cout << animal << "\n";

}

When this program is compiled and executed, sea_animal will print, but animal won’t. Why do you think that’s the case?

Scope is the region of code that can access or view a given element.

• Variables defined in global scope are accessible throughout the program.
• Variables defined in a function have local scope and are only accessible inside the function.

sea_animal was defined in global scope at the top of the program, outside of main(). So sea_animal is defined everywhere in the program.

Because animal was only defined within favorite_animal() and not returned, it is not accessible to the rest of the program.