Computers as Components, 2nd Edition

144 CHAPTER 3 CPUs

We may not have the luxury of coding the algorithm in C++. While C is almost

universally supported on embedded processors,support for languages that support

object orientation such as C++ or Java is not so universal. How would we have to

structure C code to provide multiple instantiations of the data compressor? The fun-

damental point is that we cannot rely on any global variables—all of the object state

must be replicable.We can do this relatively easily,making the code only a little more

cumbersome. We create a structure that holds the data par t of the object as follows:

struct data_compressor_struct {

data_buffer buffer;

int