Teach Yourself Borland C++ in 14 Days - portal

58 Day 2
SYNTAX
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This saves you some typing over the first method I showed you, but is not always practical
in real-world situations. In a real-world program a structure would likely be filled out as a
result of user input or possibly with data read from a file. Assigning data to the structure like
you see here is not practical in those situations.
The struct statement:
struct name {
data_member_1;
data_member_2;
.
.
.
data_member_n;
} instance;
The struct statement declares a grouping of data members (data_member_1, data_member_2,
…, data_member_n) and provides a name for this grouping (name). The optional instance
statement creates an occurrence of this grouping.
Arrays of Structures
Just as you can have arrays of ints, chars, or longs, you can also have arrays of structures.
Declaring and using an array of structures is not terribly complicated:
mailingListRecord listArray[5];
strcpy(listArray[0].firstName, “Chuck”);
listArray[4].aFoe = true; // grrrrr!!
// etc.
This is only slightly more complicated than using an array of one of the integral data types.
You will notice that the subscript operator and the structure member operator are used backto-back.
Headers and Source Files
The source file is an ASCII text file that contains the program’s source code. The compiler
takes the source code file, parses it, and produces machine language that the computer can
execute.
One of the problems with books on programming is that they use simple examples to
communicate concepts and ideas. You will undoubtedly find that things are never that
simple. So far, we have been dealing with very short programs contained in a single source
file. In the real world, a program of any consequence will have several source files. A program’s
code is divided into different source files for a number of reasons. One of the primary reasons
is organization. By keeping related chunks of code together, you can more easily find a certain
section of code when needed.