Very strange syntax in C and it works-why?

beginner16 · 02-26-2004, 06:09 AM

hi

gethostbyname() returns a structure and member of this structure is of type char **h_addr_list.So basicly h_add_list should point to an array of pointers to char.
Instead it points to an aray of pointers to struct in_addr.
How can this even work and why didn't the designers made h_addr_list of type struct in_addr **h_addr_list?

thanx

eshwar_ind · 02-26-2004, 06:24 AM

I think struct in_addr is used to hold the IP address.
U pass ip address as a string . Is it right?
If its correct , They used char ** to support for maintanance (or portability) of previous code, because this IP address size (IPv6 new address) will change as the network grows. So they might have used it instead of that struct. When we use char **. we can get the full address regardless of its size(taking \0 as the last character).

I know very little. it may be correct or wrong. Dont scold me if its wrong.
bye,
Eshwar

kev82 · 02-26-2004, 06:31 AM

if you look at the definition of struct in_addr (from netinet/in.h) you will see that the struct only has 1 member which is a 32bit unsigned integer which could be treated as 4 bytes or chars. so thats why it works, as for why they did it - i dont know as my network programming knowledge is quite limited.

beginner16 · 02-26-2004, 07:49 AM

I understand,but still h_addr_list points to an array of pointers to structures and when I tried to apply similar syntax in my code(char pointer pointing to a structure of some sort) I got an error.

kev82 · 02-26-2004, 12:54 PM

heres an example of treating an array of structs as an array of floats and it compiles/runs fine for me. hopefully this explains what happens.

Code:

#include <stdio.h>

typedef struct {
	float x;
	float y;
	float z;
} coord;

coord c[]={{-0.5f,-0.5f,0.0f},{0.5f,-0.5f,0.0f},{0.0f,1.0f,0.0f}};

int main() {
	int i;

	for(i=0;i<10;i++) {
		printf("%f\n", *(i+(float *)c));
	}
	return 0;
}

beginner16 · 02-26-2004, 04:55 PM

hi

True,but you can't make a float array and store coord structures inside of it,which is basicly what char **h_addr_list does

thanx for an example ,I didn't think it was allowed