Day 68 of 360: Mastering Structures and Union.

Today, I delved deep into structures and unions in C++, focusing on how to create them and understanding their memory assignments. This is essential for efficient data management in complex applications.

Understanding Structures in C++

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Structures in C++ are user-defined data types that allow you to group different types of data together. Think of a structure as a container that can hold various data types, unlike arrays, which only store data of the same type.**

Here’s an example of defining a structure in C++:

In this example, we’ve defined a structure called employee that contains three fields: eId (an integer), favChar (a character), and salary (a float).

Once a structure is defined, you can create instances of it like so:

Here, we've created an instance of the employee structure named harry, assigned values to its fields, and then printed these values.

Using typedef with Structures

To simplify the usage of structures, C++ provides the typedef keyword, allowing you to define an alias for the structure, making the code cleaner:

With typedef, you can now create structure variables without the struct keyword:

In this case, ep is used as an alias for struct employee, making the code more concise.

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Understanding Unions in C++**

Unions are similar to structures but with a key difference: they provide better memory management by sharing the same memory location for all its members. This means only one member can hold a value at any time.

Here’s how you define a union:

This money union can store either an integer (rice), a character (car), or a float (pounds), but only one at a time. Here’s an example of using a union:

In this code, we've assigned a value to rice and printed it. If you try to access another member after assigning a value, you might get unexpected results (garbage values) because all members share the same memory location.

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