Re: Regarding assignment to struct

On 5/2/25 2:34 PM, Lew Pitcher wrote:

Back in the days of K&R, Kernighan and Ritchie published an addendum
to the "C Reference Manual" titled "Recent Changes to C" (November 1978)
in which they detailed some differences in the C language post "The
C Programming Language".
 The first difference they noted was that
   "Structures may be assigned, passed as arguments to functions, and
    returned by functions."
  From what I can see of the ISO C standards, the current C language
has kept these these features. However, I don't see many C projects
using them.
 I have a project in which these capabilities might come in handy; has
anyone had experience with assigning to structures, passing them as
arguments to functions, and/or having a function return a structure?
 Would code like
   struct ab {
     int a;
     char *b;
   } result, function(void);
    if ((result = function()).a == 10) puts(result.b);
 be understandable, or even legal?
 

I will say that I have used the feature, but in very limited conditions, mostly where the structure is no bigger than one or two typical words.
It could be a structure with a bitfield to make accesses clearer than low level masking, or for a "point" with x and y tied into one object.
Bigger than that, and you likely want to pass the object by address, not by value, passing just a pointer to it.