A structure groups different types of data together; each element of the structure is called a member. The structure members are accessed using constant offsets. To understand the concept, take a look at the following C program. The simpleStruct
definition contains three member variables (a
, b
, and c
) of different data types. The main
function defines the structure variable (test_stru
) at ➊, and the address of the structure variable (&test_stru
) is passed as the first argument at ➋ to the update
function. Inside of the update
function, the member variables are assigned values:
struct simpleStruct { int a; short int b; char c; }; void update(struct simpleStruct *test_stru_ptr) { test_stru_ptr->a = 6; test_stru_ptr->b = 7; test_stru_ptr->c = 'A'; } int main() { struct simpleStruct test_stru; ➊ update(&test_stru); ➋ return 0; }
In order to understand how the members of the structures are accessed, let's look at the disassembled output of the...