Chapter 6 - Structures

A structure is a collection of one or more variables, possibly of different types, grouped together under a single name for convenient handling. (Structures are called "records" in some languages, notably Pascal.) Structures help to organize complicated data, particularly in large programs, because they permit a group of related variables to be treated as a unit instead of as separate entities.

One traditional example of a structure is the payroll record: an employee is described by a set of attributes such as name, address, social security number, salary, etc. Some of these in turn could be structures: a name has several components, as does an address and even a salary. Another example, more typical for C, comes from graphics: a point is a pair of coordinates, a rectangle is a pair of points, and so on.

The main change made by the ANSI standard is to define structure assignment - structures may be copied and assigned to, passed to functions, and returned by functions. This has been supported by most compilers for many years, but the properties are now precisely defined. Automatic structures and arrays may now also be initialized.