Final Thoughts

In many ways the C struct is the key data structure in C and it is so much more than just an implementation of a data record found in other languages. It is central to the idea that C deals with bits as it is structs that let you determine what the bits mean. This is obvious to any programmer using C for the sort of tasks it was designed for – systems programming and hardware programming. Unfortunately, this is not a view shared by the programmers on the standards committees and the compiler writers, who in the main strive to make C look like a modern language and try to make it easier to optimize the code. This goes against the low-level appeal of structs and type punning in general and even makes them seem undesirable and dangerous.

For a fuller discussion, see Dive 16 which deals with the scandal of undefined behavior.

Deep C Dives
Adventures in C

By Mike James

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Contents

Preface
Prolog C
Dive

1. All You Need Are Bits
2. These aren’t the types you’re looking for
3. Type Casting
4. Expressions
5. Bits and More Bits
       Extract: Bits!
   
6. The Brilliant But Evil for 
7. Into the Void 
8. Blocks, Stacks and Locals
9. Static Storage
10. Pointers
11. The Array and Pointer Arithmetic
12. Heap, The Third Memory Allocation
13. First Class Functions
        Extract: First Class Functions
    
14. Structs and Objects
        Extract: Value Structs ***NEW!
15. The Union
16. Undefined Behavior
17. Exceptions and the Long Jump
    

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