Further Uses of Structures

As we have seen, a structure is a good way of storing related data together. It is also a good way of representing certain types of information. Complex numbers in mathematics inhabit a two dimensional plane (stretching in real and imaginary directions). These could easily be represented here by

  typedef struct {
          double real;
          double imag;
  } complex;

doubles have been used for each field because their range is greater than floats and because the majority of mathematical library functions deal with doubles by default.

In a similar way, structures could be used to hold the locations of points in multi-dimensional space. Mathematicians and engineers might see a storage efficient implementation for sparse arrays here.

Apart from holding data, structures can be used as members of other structures. Arrays of structures are possible, and are a good way of storing lists of data with regular fields, such as databases.

Another possibility is a structure whose fields include pointers to its own type. These can be used to build chains (programmers call these linked lists), trees or other connected structures. These are rather daunting to the new programmer, so we won't deal with them here.

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