`block` syntax and my confusion

[lkedward]

Hi @zoziha, welcome to the Discourse!
You may find this previous answer of mine relevant:

Arbitrary sized array

My understanding is that the block construct simply allows programmers to organise code by grouping declarations and statements together within a defined local scope. This can have some advantages: It avoids large declaration blocks at the beginning of programs and procedures; it is easier to reason which variables are used in which execution statements when reading the code; it limits the scope of variables so they can’t accidentally be used elsewhere; it can be useful for objects w…

See also this particular use case where block was uniquely helpful for scoping:

Best practices for passing C strings

Steve’s recent blog post might be relevant here regarding the intrinsic keyword. Would this modification work perhaps? block intrinsic trim if (trim_) then f_c_string = trim(string)//c_null_char else f_c_string = string//c_null_char end if end block

and this answer about local scope in do concurrent:

Arbitrary sized array

If you want to have thread-local variables inside a do concurrent you have to use the block construct.