C++: Structs

These lessons have covered quite a lot of C++ stuff; however I seem to have somehow missed out the struct!

A struct is basically a data structure, you treat struct objects a bit like objects from a C++ class (In fact in a lot of ways structs are like classes).

You can create a struct using the struct keyword like so:

struct struct_name{
int memberone;
float memberone;
};

In this case the struct is called "struct_name" (very creative I know) and it has two members, memberone and membertwo; You can have as many members as you want in a struct, and they can be of various types.
Then we end the struct with a closing curly bracket followed by a semicolon.

Just so we can work a bit more closely with structs, lets just create the following struct as an example:

struct Food{
int weight;
float price;
};

The struct above will be used to store various foods, which each have a weight and a price.
You create a struct object like you would create a variable:

Food apple;

Obviously in the case above we are creating an object called "apple".

We can then assign values for the different members of our struct to our object (give it a weight and price).
We do this by using a "." between the variable and the member of the variable we want to assign a value to, for example:

apple.weight = 12;
apple.price = 30;

After assigning these values we can simply treat "apple.weight" and "apple.price" as normal variables; and do all sorts of things with them.

Here is a simple program which tells you information about an apple and a doughnut:

#include <iostream>

using namespace std;

struct Food{
int weight;
float price;
};

int main(){

Food apple;
Food doughnut;

cout << "Welcome to the apple and doughnut shop!\n\n"

apple.weight = 18;
apple.price = 30;
cout << "The apple's weight is: " << apple.weight << endl;
cout << "The apple's price is: " << apple.price << endl;

doughnut.weight = 10;
doughnut.price = 50;
cout << "The doughnut's weight is: " << doughnut.weight << endl;
cout << "The doughnut's price is: " << doughnut.price << endl;

system("PAUSE");
return 0;
}

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