Before discussing classes, this lesson will be an introduction to data structures similar to classes. Structures are a way of storing many different values in variables of potentially different types under the same name. This makes it a more modular program, which is easier to modify because its design makes things more compact. Structs are generally useful whenever a lot of data needs to be grouped together--for instance, they can be used to hold records from a database or to store information about contacts in an address book. In the contacts example, a struct could be used that would hold all of the information about a single contact--name, address, phone number, and so forth. |