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Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!micomvax!othervax!scott
From: scott@othervax.UUCP (Scott Pace)
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: Re: How do I declare...
Message-ID: <690@othervax.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 27-Aug-85 14:39:58 EDT
Article-I.D.: othervax.690
Posted: Tue Aug 27 14:39:58 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 29-Aug-85 21:28:39 EDT
References: <368@persci.UUCP> <159@rtp47.UUCP>
Reply-To: scott@othervax.UUCP (Scott Pace)
Organization: Philips Information Systems - St. Laurent  P.Q., Canada
Lines: 49
Summary: 

>> Either I'm missing the perfectly obvious or I've found something
>> that's impossible to declare in C, even though it makes sense.

>You have discovered a fundamental flaw in C type notation.  In essence,
>C allows recursive types only in structs, unions, and enums (and I'm not
>sure how it would be usefull in enums, so that one can be ruled out for
>practical purposes).
>
>Thus, if you want an array of pointers to arrays of pointers, you can't
>do it.  Nor can you declare functions returning pointers to functions.


Well, our compiler seems to handle these sort of constructs ok:-

looking at an array of pointers to arrays of pointers first...

int *(*foo1[10])[];

here foo1 is an array of pointers, each pointer pointing to an array
of pointers to int's.
Thus an integer element might be accessed as follows:

*(*foo1[1])[2] and another way might be **foo1[0]


now looking at functions returning pointers to functions:-

int *(*func1())();

here func is a function returning a pointer to a function, and this
function returns a pointer to an int.
Thus you could do things like:

int *(*func2)(); /*pointer to a function returning a pointer to int*/
int *x;
.
.
.
func2 = func1();
x = (func2)();
.
.
etc.

Cheers

	Scott Pace, ...!philabs!micomvax!othervax!scott

(I hope I got all that right!!!)