Sams Teach Yourself C in 21 Days

Implementing Structures, Unions, and TypeDefs 275

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This is repeated in the header for the function in line 34. When calling the function, you

only have to pass the structure instance name—in this case,rec(line 30). That’s all there

is to it. Passing a structure to a function isn’t very different from passing a simple vari-

able.

You can also pass a structure to a function by passing the structure’s address (that is, a

pointer to the structure). In fact, in older versions of C, this was the only way to pass a

structure as an argument. It’s not necessary now, but you might see older programs that

still use this method. If you pass a pointer to a structure as an argument, remember that

you must use the indirect membership operator (->) to access structure members in the

function.

DOtake advantage of declaring a

pointer to a structure—especially when

using arrays of structures.

DOuse the indirect membership opera-

tor (->) when working with a pointer to

a structure.

DON’Tconfuse arrays with structures.

DON’Tforget that when you increment a

pointer, it moves a distance equivalent to

the size of the data to which it points. In

the case of a pointer to a structure, this

is the size of the structure.

DO DON’T

Understanding Unions ........................................................................................

Unionsare similar to structures. A union is declared and used in the same ways that a

structure is. A union differs from a structure in that only one of its members can be used

at a time. The reason for this is simple. All the members of a union occupy the same area

of memory—they are laid on top of one another.

Defining, Declaring, and Initializing Unions ................................................

Unions are defined and declared in the same fashion as structures. The only difference in

the declarations is that the keyword unionis used instead of struct. To define a simple

union of a charvariable and an integer variable, you would write the following:

union shared

{

char c;

int i;

};

This union,shared, can be used to create instances of a union that can hold either a char-

acter value cor an integer value i. This is an ORcondition. Unlike a structure that would

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