C Primer Plus, Fourth Edition

Pointers to Structures

Pointer lovers will be glad to know that you can have pointers to structures. There are at least three reasons why having pointers to structures is a good idea. First, just as pointers to arrays are easier to manipulate (in a sorting problem, say) than the arrays themselves, so pointers to structures are often easier to manipulate than structures themselves. Second, in some older implementations, a structure can't be passed as an argument to a function, but a pointer to a structure can. Third, many wondrous data representations use structures containing pointers to other structures.

The next short example (Listing 14.4) shows how to define a pointer to a structure and how to use it to access the members of a structure. ...