How do you implement a class in C? [closed]

Answer 1

#include <stdio.h>
#include <math.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <uchar.h>

/**
 * Define Shape class
 */
typedef struct Shape Shape;
struct Shape {
    /**
     * Variables header...
     */
    double width, height;

    /**
     * Functions header...
     */
    double (*area)(Shape *shape);
};

/**
 * Functions
 */
double calc(Shape *shape) {
        return shape->width * shape->height;
}

/**
 * Constructor
 */
Shape _Shape() {
    Shape s;

    s.width = 1;
    s.height = 1;

    s.area = calc;

    return s;
}

/********************************************/

int main() {
    Shape s1 = _Shape();
    s1.width = 5.35;
    s1.height = 12.5462;

    printf("Hello World\n\n");

    printf("User.width = %f\n", s1.width);
    printf("User.height = %f\n", s1.height);
    printf("User.area = %f\n\n", s1.area(&s1));

    printf("Made with \xe2\x99\xa5 \n");

    return 0;
};

Answer 2

The first c++ compiler actually was a preprocessor which translated the C++ code into C.

So it's very possible to have classes in C. You might try and dig up an old C++ preprocessor and see what kind of solutions it creates.

Answer 3

C Interfaces and Implementations: Techniques for Creating Reusable Software, David R. Hanson

http://www.informit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0201498413

This book does an excellent job of covering your question. It's in the Addison Wesley Professional Computing series.

The basic paradigm is something like this:

/* for data structure foo */

FOO *myfoo;
myfoo = foo_create(...);
foo_something(myfoo, ...);
myfoo = foo_append(myfoo, ...);
foo_delete(myfoo);

Answer 4

Use a struct to simulate the data members of a class. In terms of method scope you can simulate private methods by placing the private function prototypes in the .c file and the public functions in the .h file.

Answer 5

If you only want one class, use an array of structs as the "objects" data and pass pointers to them to the "member" functions. You can use typedef struct _whatever Whatever before declaring struct _whatever to hide the implementation from client code. There's no difference between such an "object" and the C standard library FILE object.

If you want more than one class with inheritance and virtual functions, then it's common to have pointers to the functions as members of the struct, or a shared pointer to a table of virtual functions. The GObject library uses both this and the typedef trick, and is widely used.

There's also a book on techniques for this available online - Object Oriented Programming with ANSI C.

Answer 6

My approach would be to move the struct and all primarily-associated functions to a separate source file(s) so that it can be used "portably".

Depending on your compiler, you might be able to include functions into the struct, but that's a very compiler-specific extension, and has nothing to do with the last version of the standard I routinely used :)