Tag Archives: safety

The hokey-cokey* of function calls

Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
Glennan is an embedded systems and software engineer with over 20 years experience, mostly in high-integrity systems for the defence and aerospace industry.

He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Glennan Carnie

Functions are the lifeblood of a C program. The program flow is altered by passing parameters to functions, which are then manipulated. Conceptually function parameters are defined as being either:

Inputs (Read-only) – client-supplied objects manipulated within the function only
Outputs (Write-only) – objects generated by the function for use by the client.
Input-Outputs (Read-Write) – client objects that can be manipulated by the function.

Defining the use of a parameter gives vital information not only to the implementer, but (perhaps more importantly) to […]

Posted in C/C++ Programming, Design Issues | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment