The static ancestors of a subprogram sub() are all the procedures in the program within which the procedure sub() is defined, i.e., the definition of the procedure sub() is nested. The definition of a procedure may be directly nested within only one procedure, called its static parent procedure. However, this static parent procedure may itself be nested within another procedure, and so on up to the main() program. All these procedures are considered to be static ancestors of the procedure sub(). Simply put, the static ancestors are those that strictly contain the subprogram in question