[OT] C question (typedef & structs)
Lowell Gilbert
freebsd-questions-local at be-well.ilk.org
Thu Oct 2 09:03:16 PDT 2003
Bill Moran <wmoran at potentialtech.com> writes:
> 1) What's the difference between:
>
> struct customStruct {
> int RecID;
> char *Name;
> };
>
> and
>
> typedef struct customStruct {
> int RecID;
> char *Name;
> };
>
> ??
>
> I had the latter, but when I started moving my code into
> different files to reorganize things, gcc started giving
> me warnings. The warnings went away when I moved to the
> former. I can't quite figure out what the difference is.
> Is one correct and the other not?
I'm not sure whether the second is illegal or not, but in any case it
doesn't make any sense (so I can't be bothered to look it up). In
both cases, customStruct is the *structure* tag, not a type name.
If you wanted to use a typedef, it would be more like:
typedef struct customStruct {
int RecID;
char *Name;
} customType;
> 2) I'm a self-taught C programmer. That means that I know
> a lot, but I often bump into things that I should know
> (like question #1) that I don't. Does anyone have a
> suggestion for a mailing list that would be good for
> asking questions like the above? Keep in mind that
> I'm not an amature, I'm just not formally trained, so
> I bump into lots of areas that I'm not sure what I'm
> doing because I haven't studied it yet ;)
If you're sticking to strictly ANSI C like this, the comp.lang.c
newsgroup is a good place to go. More useful is its FAQ, which
you can find at "http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/faq.html". There
are other newsgroups on C, including one for learners, but I don't
have the precise name at hand.
A good book might be a better bet, though. Both Kernighan & Ritchie
and Harbison & Steele have discussions of typedefs that show how to
use them with structures.
Good luck.
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