CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c
developer1
developer1

Reputation: 73

What to change to make my C program more user-friendly?

I have a program that creates, inserts into, deletes from and destroys priority queue in C. Everything works fine, but I have a task to make it easier for user to create the queue.

int Error;
PrQueue* q1= create(&Error);
PrQueue* q2 = create(&Error);
PrQueue* q3 = create(&Error);

Here is how I create the priority queue. 

PrQueue* create(int* Error)
{
PrQueue* Meta = (PrQueue*)malloc(sizeof(PrQueue));
if(Meta == NULL)
{
    *Error = 1;
    return NULL;
}
Meta->NrOfItems = 0;
Meta->Head = NULL;
*Error = 0;
return Meta;
}

That's the function

typedef struct Element
{
int Data;
int Priority;
struct Element *Next;
struct Element *Prev;
} Element;


typedef struct
{
int NrOfItems;
struct Element *Head;

} PrQueue;

And that's the structure. All of these code parts are in different files. The first one is main.c , second one is functions.c and the third one is a .h header file. So what I need is somehow make it easier for the user to create the priority queue in main, I should somehow get rid of the pointers symbol in main. I don't really know how it should look, but as I understand it shouldn't use * in the main. Any ideas what and how I should change?

Thanks!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 75

Answers (1)

Jeremy Friesner
Jeremy Friesner

Reputation: 73161

My recommendation is to convert your create() function to an init() function; this will allow the user to create PrQueue objects inside other objects and/or on the stack, rather than only on the heap:

void init(PrQueue * Meta)
{   
   Meta->NrOfItems = 0;
   Meta->Head = NULL;
}

It also means there is no possibility of the function failing, so the user won't have to do any error-checking.

The user could use it like this:

int main(int argc, char ** argv)
{
   PrQueue q;
   init(&q);
   [...]
}

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions