simple tricks in c Programming-Tricks1

 

Tricks1

I have been in a fair number of programming courses in my life. Several of these have been in the hallowed C programming language. There was a time when C and C++ were the only languages I could call myself proficient in.

Over the years, I have seen a constant pattern in all these courses - they teach you all the basics you should learn, but none of what you will need. For instance, you have been taught to use structures, but not much about how to use them to make sense of vile madness that you might often encounter while coding in C. There is this neat trick I will show you which uses structures and can really simplify working with arrays. There’s something easy you can do with macros to make dynamic allocations tons of times readable. And yes, there are amazing tools right inside stdio.h which can make string manipulation much easier. And you can use this trick to implement some radical changes in the way you code C.

This is not an article for professional C programmers. This is for Python and Javascript programmers who would like to be able to really use C, the way they are used to making their favourite languages do useful things.

Typedef the structs, unless it contains a pointer to itself

Generally, when we work with the struct datatype, we define the structures something like this:

struct Position

{

  double latitude;

  double longitude;

  double altitude;

};

And then we declare the variables of this structure something like this:

struct Position mypos;

 

I have no problem with this - it is a classic method, something every good C programmers would know - but must I place the struct keyword twice here? Might I suggest a simple idiom for defining the structure which changes the whole feel of the code to something more modern and less archaic?

typedef struct

{

    double latitude;

    double longitude;

    double altitude;

} Position;

And that is all. We do not give the structure a name, but we use it as part of a typedef to make a new name for the specific datatype which is this structure. Now, this is what the declaration would look like:

Position mypos;

This is much more readable to anyone who is more familiar with OOP code than with C code.

Why would someone do this? Because even for those of us who work only in higher level languages like Python, Javascript and Java, there are times when we just have to use a small snippet of C. (scratch that, there is no such thing as a small snippet of C - it is at least thirty lines;) This is a simple tool to maintain your sanity if you are ever stuck in such a situation and need to make a C code, but are really wishing that there was some OOP feel to it.