Programmers’ theoretical minimum: struct
In C and C++ there is a special keyword called struct that allow you to declare a bunch of data items grouped togheter.
Define a struct is pretty easy. It’s enough add the struct keyword before a block (delimited by curly braces), optionally followeb by a name (e.g. my_struct). Is also possible add variable names after the struct definition. This means we are declaring such variables of this struct type, for example:
struct my_struct{
item_1
item_2
. . .
item_n
} variable_1, variable_1;The items in a struct can be vary: data declarations, individual data items, arrays, other structs, pointers, and so on.
Structs are very similar to classes in C++. The main difference is that in a struct all members (data an functions) are public by default, while for a class all members are private by default 1.
One interesting thing that you can do with a struct, is transform a generic type to be used as a first-class type. For instance, look at the code below:
1
2
/* array inside a struct */
struct my_array { int a[10]; };
You can now copy the entire array with an assignment statement, pass it to a function by value, and make it the return type of a function. Obviously it’s not very efficient to put an array inside a struct, but this depends by yours designing skills of good software.
##Further Information
Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets by Peter van der Linden