Beginning C: From Novice to Professional, Fourth Edition

CHAPTER 11Structuring Data

So far, you've learned how to declare and define variables that can hold various types of data, including integers, floating-point values, and characters. You also have the means to create arrays of any of these types and arrays of pointers to memory locations containing data of the types available to you. Although these have proved very useful, there are many applications in which you need even more flexibility.

For instance, suppose you want to write a program that processes data about breeding horses. You need information about each horse such as its name, its date of birth, its coloring, its height, its parentage, and so on. Some items are strings and some are numeric. Clearly, you could set up arrays for each ...