Heap Vs/And Data Segment

[mailursubbu]

Hi,

Is heap and Data Segment are same? Are they slightly different??

Best Regards,
Subra...

 

[Eric Sosman]

Hi,

Is heap and Data Segment are same? Are they slightly different??

As far as the C language is concerned, they are exactly
the same: neither exists.

Some concrete implementations of C use these terms to
describe regions of memory that the implementation handles
differently, but that's a detail of the implementation and
not a feature of the language.

<off-topic>

In some implementations, a "data segment" is a region of
memory initialized by copying its contents from a portion of
the executable program file, and perhaps applying some fixups
for address relocations and the like.

In some implementations, the "heap" is a data structure
describing the contents of a region of memory that can grow
at run-time to satisfy the demand for dynamically-allocated
memory.

</off-topic>