self referential struct definition?

Question

I haven\'t been writing C for very long, and so I\'m not sure about how I should go about doing these sorts of recursive things... I would like each cell to contain another

Answer 1

In C, you cannot reference the typedef that you're creating withing the structure itself. You have to use the structure name, as in the following test program:

#include 
#include 

typedef struct Cell {
  int cellSeq;
  struct Cell* next; /* 'tCell *next' will not work here */
} tCell;

int main(void) {
    int i;
    tCell *curr;
    tCell *first;
    tCell *last;

    /* Construct linked list, 100 down to 80. */

    first = malloc (sizeof (tCell));
    last = first;
    first->cellSeq = 100;
    first->next = NULL;
    for (i = 0; i < 20; i++) {
        curr = malloc (sizeof (tCell));
        curr->cellSeq = last->cellSeq - 1;
        curr->next = NULL;
        last->next = curr;
        last = curr;
    }

    /* Walk the list, printing sequence numbers. */

    curr = first;
    while (curr != NULL) {
        printf ("Sequence = %d\n", curr->cellSeq);
        curr = curr->next;
    }

    return 0;
}

Although it's probably a lot more complicated than this in the standard, you can think of it as the compiler knowing about struct Cell on the first line of the typedef but not knowing about tCell until the last line :-) That's how I remember that rule.