Book Image

Extreme C

By : Kamran Amini
5 (2)
Book Image

Extreme C

5 (2)
By: Kamran Amini

Overview of this book

There’s a lot more to C than knowing the language syntax. The industry looks for developers with a rigorous, scientific understanding of the principles and practices. Extreme C will teach you to use C’s advanced low-level power to write effective, efficient systems. This intensive, practical guide will help you become an expert C programmer. Building on your existing C knowledge, you will master preprocessor directives, macros, conditional compilation, pointers, and much more. You will gain new insight into algorithm design, functions, and structures. You will discover how C helps you squeeze maximum performance out of critical, resource-constrained applications. C still plays a critical role in 21st-century programming, remaining the core language for precision engineering, aviations, space research, and more. This book shows how C works with Unix, how to implement OO principles in C, and fully covers multi-processing. In Extreme C, Amini encourages you to think, question, apply, and experiment for yourself. The book is essential for anybody who wants to take their C to the next level.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)

Anonymous structures and anonymous unions

Anonymous structures and anonymous unions are type definitions without names, and they are usually used in other types as a nested type. It is easier to explain them with an example. Here, you can see a type that has both an anonymous structure and an anonymous union in one place, displayed in Code Box 12-10:

typedef struct {
  union {
    struct {
      int x;
      int y;
    };
    int data[2];
  };
} point_t;

Code Box 12-10: Example of an anonymous structure together with an anonymous union

The preceding type uses the same memory for the anonymous structure and the byte array field data. The following code box shows how it can be used in a real example:

#include <stdio.h>
typedef struct {
  union {
    struct {
      int x;
      int y;
    };
    int data[2];
  };
} point_t;
int main(int argc, char** argv) {
  point_t p;
  p.x = 10;
  p.data[1] = -5;
  printf("Point (%d, %d) using an anonymous structure inside an...