Can you define a function in C that can have indefinite parameters as inputs?

Queries in C


Can anyone please tell me what are the advantages and disadvantages of macros? I would also lie to know the main difference between malloc and calloc.

One more question -

Can you define a function that can have indefinite parameters as inputs?

Thank you
Regards
Soniya

c querries

Now i can answer you the last question.
We can define a function that have indefinite parameters as input.
for this problem we can use the stdarg macros which defined in the stdarg.h head file. this head file has defined a type va_list and 3 macros --va_start, va_arg , va_end. we can declare a varibale of va_list type, and with the three macros to access the parameters.

/*
** Compute the average of the specified number of values.
*/

#include <stdarg.h>

float
average( int n_values, ... )
{
va_list var_arg;
int count;
float sum = 0;

/*
** Prepare to access the variable arguments.
*/
va_start( var_arg, n_values );

/*
** Add the values from the variable argument list.
*/
for( count = 0; count < n_values; count += 1 ){
sum += va_arg( var_arg, int );
}

/*
** Done processing variable arguments.
*/
va_end( var_arg );

return sum / n_values;
}



all of this you can refer to <pointers on c>by kenneth A.Reek chapter 7.6 .

(forgive my poor english)

Re: C queries

malloc allocates a block of size specified from the memory. A program is clearly allowed to allocate memory as what is needed by it.

On success malloc returns a pointer to the newly allocated memory block

Calloc is similar to malloc rather it takes one more argument n_items which is multiplied with the second argument size_t which is the size to allocate and allocates a block of size n_items*size.

It also initializes all the locations to 0 which is not done by malloc.

Note: calloc can be used for allocating size upto 64K, for allocation beyond 64K, you've to use farcalloc.