C++ Primer Plus

Other Structure Properties

C++ makes user-defined types as similar as possible to built-in types. For example, you can pass structures as arguments to a function, and you can have a function use a structure as a return value. Also you can use the assignment operator (=) to assign one structure to another of the same type. Doing so causes each member of one structure to be set to the value of the corresponding member in the other structure, even if the member is an array. This kind of assignment is called memberwise assignment. We’ll defer passing and returning structures until we discuss functions in Chapter 7, “Functions: C++’s Programming Modules,” but we can take a quick look at structure assignment now. Listing 4.12 provides an example.