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In the C programming language, struct is the keyword used to define a composite, a.k.a. record, data type – a named set of values that occupy a block of memory. It allows for the different values to be accessed via a single identifier, often a pointer.
Structures may be initialized or assigned to using compound literals. A function may directly return a structure, although this is often not efficient at run-time. Since C99, a structure may also end with a flexible array member. A structure containing a pointer to a structure of its own type is commonly used to build linked data structures:
A structure can also be assigned as a unit to another structure of the same type. Structures (and pointers to structures) may also be used as function parameter and return types. For example, the following statement assigns the value of 74 (the ASCII code point for the letter 't') to the member named x in the structure tee, from above:
C. C (programming language) C dynamic memory allocation; C file input/output; C syntax; C data types; C23 (C standard revision) Callback (computer programming) CIE 1931 color space; Coalesced hashing; Code injection; Comment (computer programming) Composite data type; Conditional (computer programming) Const (computer programming) Constant ...
In structured programming, these can be replicated by adding additional branches or tests, but for returns from nested code this can add significant complexity. C is an early and prominent example of these constructs. Some newer languages also have "labeled breaks", which allow breaking out of more than just the innermost loop.
An abstract syntax tree (AST) is a data structure used in computer science to represent the structure of a program or code snippet. It is a tree representation of the abstract syntactic structure of text (often source code) written in a formal language. Each node of the tree denotes a construct occurring in the text.
The example C code below illustrates how structure objects are dynamically allocated and referenced. The standard C library provides the function malloc() for allocating memory blocks from the heap. It takes the size of an object to allocate as a parameter and returns a pointer to a newly allocated block of memory suitable for storing the ...
One use for such "packed" structures is to conserve memory. For example, a structure containing a single byte (such as a char) and a four-byte integer (such as uint32_t) would require three additional bytes of padding. A large array of such structures would use 37.5% less memory if they are packed, although accessing each structure might take ...