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iOS Objective-C Basics (Retired) Pointers and Memory Structs

Posted by Antoine Guenet
Antoine Guenet
2,843 Points

Why declare variables c and r in main() ?

Hi,

I was wondering why we need to declare c and r as variables to then use our function using them as arguments. Why not simply use our function with the values we want to assign to c and r in them ? In other words, why :

float c[] = {1, 2, 3};
float r = 4;
Sphere ball = makeSphere(c, r);

and not :

Sphere ball = makeSphere([1, 2, 3], 4);

I tried that second one and it doesn't work. Is that because of the array ?

Thanks,

Antoine

1 Answer

Denis Kiselev
Denis Kiselev
12,737 Points
Denis Kiselev
Denis Kiselev
12,737 Points

C language is quite old, and have no some syntax sugar, like more modern languages like Swift, C# and so on. Even Objective-C have more sugar than C. Why? C should be conservative to preserve huge codebase.

In C you can not use inline declaration of constant array like makeShere( {1,2,3}, 4);

But for second argument - "float r", it's completely ok to pass constant as second argument to makeSphere.

One note: not sure why arguments in function and variables in main are all have same names - its not required. All you need is to match type of passing arguments, not name.