Hiding members in a C struct
- by Marlon
I've been reading about OOP in C but I never liked how you can't have private data members like you can in C++. But then it came to my mind that you could create 2 structures. One is defined in the header file and the other is defined in the source file.
// =========================================
// in somestruct.h
typedef struct {
int _public_member;
} SomeStruct;
// =========================================
// in somestruct.cpp
#include "somestruct.h"
typedef struct {
int _public_member;
int _private_member;
} SomeStructSource;
SomeStruct *SomeStruct_Create()
{
SomeStructSource *p = (SomeStructSource *)malloc(sizeof(SomeStructSource));
p->_private_member = 0xWHATEVER;
return (SomeStruct *)p;
}
From here you can just cast one structure to the other.
Is this considered bad practice? Or is it done often?
(I think this is done with a lot of the structures when using the Win32 API, but you guys are the experts let me know!)
