Become familiar with structures and unions from "summary" of C/C++ Programmer's Reference by Herbert Schildt
To work effectively in C or C++, you must become proficient with structures and unions. These two features enable you to create complex data types that can hold multiple pieces of related information. In this way, structures and unions are similar to arrays. However, structures and unions offer more flexibility and power. A structure is a user-defined data type that groups together related variables of different data types. For example, you can create a structure to represent a person, with variables for the person's name, age, and address. Each variable in a structure is called a member. You can access members of a structure using the dot operator. Unions are similar to structures, but with one key difference: in a union, all members share the same memory location. This means that only one member of a union can be used at a time. Unions are useful when you need to store different types of data in the same memory location. For example, you could create a union to represent a variable that can hold either an integer or a floating-point number. Both structures and unions are defined using the struct keyword. Once you have defined a structure or union, you can create variables of that type, just like you would with built-in data types. You can also initialize structures and unions when you declare them, by providing values for their members. To access members of a structure or union variable, you use the dot operator. For example, if you have a structure variable called person, you can access the person's name using person. name. If you have a union variable called data, you can access its integer member using data. int_val. In summary, structures and unions are powerful features of C and C++ that enable you to create custom data types to suit your needs. By understanding how to work with structures and unions, you can write more flexible and efficient code.
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