C Primer Plus, Fourth Edition

Telling Functions About Structures

Recall that function arguments pass values to the function. Each value is a number, perhaps int, perhaps float, perhaps ASCII character code, or perhaps an address. A structure is a bit more complicated than a single value, so it is not surprising that ancient C implementations do not allow a structure to be used as an argument for a function. This limitation was removed in newer implementations, and ANSI C allows structures to be used as arguments. Therefore, modern implementations give you a choice between passing structures as arguments or passing pointers to structures as arguments, or if you are concerned with just part of a structure, you can pass structure members as arguments. We'll examine all three ...