Disclaimer: I am a complete newbie with C, but I've been playing with it trying to mimic some features of classes. Ok, I know that if I want to go that way I should learn C++, but consider the following a little experiment.
Schreiner, in the book Object-oriented programming with ANSI-C suggests a way to use pointers to get object orientation features in C. I must admit I have only skimmed through the book, but I don't like his approach too much. Basically, he uses pointers to functions in order to arrange that
func(foo);
actually results in calling
foo.methods->func();
where foo.methods is a struct containing pointers to functions. The thing I do not like in this approach is that one has to have the global function foo anyway; that is, methods are not namespaced by the class they live in. My feeling is that this will soon lead to clutter: think two objects foo and bar, both having a method func but with a different number of parameters.
So I have tried to get something more fit to my taste. A first attempt is the following (I omit the declarations for sake of brevity)
#include <stdio.h>
//Instances of this struct will be my objects
struct foo {
//Properties
int bar;
//Methods
void (* print)(struct foo self);
void (* printSum)(struct foo self, int delta);
};
//Here is the actual implementation of the methods
static void printFoo(struct foo self) {
printf("This is bar: %d\n", self.bar);
}
static void printSumFoo(struct foo self, int delta) {
printf("This is bar plus delta: %d\n", self.bar + delta);
}
//This is a sort of constructor
struct foo Foo(int bar) {
struct foo foo = {
.bar = bar,
.print = &printFoo,
.printSum = &printSumFoo
};
return foo;
}
//Finally, this is how one calls the methods