Why do structures need to be told how big they are?

Posted by GameTrainersWTF on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by GameTrainersWTF
Published on 2010-05-31T01:11:22Z Indexed on 2010/05/31 1:12 UTC
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I've noticed that in c/c++ a lot of Win32 API structs need to be told how big they are. i.e someStruct.pbFormat = sizeof(SomeStruct)

Why is this the case? Is it just for legacy reasons? Also any idea what "pb" stands for too?

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Developer IT

Why do structures need to be told how big they are? - Developer IT

Why do structures need to be told how big they are?

c++

c

struct

sizeof

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