8.2 Scope of Declarations

For each declaration, the language rules define a certain portion of the program text called the scope of the declaration. The scope of a declaration is also called the scope of any view or entity declared by the declaration. Within the scope of an entity, and only there, there are places where it is legal to refer to the declared entity. These places are defined by the rules of visibility and overloading.

The immediate scope of a declaration is a portion of the declarative region immediately enclosing the declaration. The immediate scope starts at the beginning of the declaration, except in the case of an overloadable declaration, in which case the immediate scope starts just after the place where the profile of the callable entity is determined (which is at the end of the _specification for the callable entity, or at the end of the generic_instantiation if an instance). The immediate scope extends to the end of the declarative region, with the following exceptions: 

The visible part of (a view of) an entity is a portion of the text of its declaration containing declarations that are visible from outside. The private part of (a view of) an entity that has a visible part contains all declarations within the declaration of (the view of) the entity, except those in the visible part; these are not visible from outside. Visible and private parts are defined only for these kinds of entities: callable entities, other program units, and composite types. 

The scope of a declaration always contains the immediate scope of the declaration. In addition, for a given declaration that occurs immediately within the visible part of an outer declaration, or is a public child of an outer declaration, the scope of the given declaration extends to the end of the scope of the outer declaration, except that the scope of a library_item includes only its semantic dependents. 

  The scope of an attribute_definition_clause is identical to the scope of a declaration that would occur at the point of the attribute_definition_clause. The scope of an aspect_specification is identical to the scope of the associated declaration.

The immediate scope of a declaration is also the immediate scope of the entity or view declared by the declaration. Similarly, the scope of a declaration is also the scope of the entity or view declared by the declaration. 

The immediate scope of a pragma that is not used as a configuration pragma is defined to be the region extending from immediately after the pragma to the end of the declarative region immediately enclosing the pragma.