nesting

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nesting A feature of language design in which constructs can be embedded within instances of themselves, e.g. nested loops:

while b1 do

begin

  while b2 do

  begin

   …

  end;

end;

Nesting of blocks in block-structured languages provides an elegant, though not entirely practicable, control over the scope of identifiers, since identifiers are local to the innermost level of nesting at which they are declared.

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