C Primer Plus®, Third Edition

Abstract Data Types (ADTs)

In programming, you try to match the data type to the needs of a programming problem. For instance, you would use the int type to represent the number of shoes you own and the float or double type to represent your average cost per pair of shoes. In the movie examples, the data formed a list of items, each of which consisted of a movie name (a C string) and rating (an int). No basic C type matches that description, so we defined a structure to represent individual items, and then we devised a couple of methods for tying together a series of structures to form a list. In essence, we used C's capabilities to design a new data type that matched our needs, but we did so unsystematically. Now we'll take a more systematic ...