[Solved] How do you use the user keyword “list”?

Question

First up, list in this context is a variable name, not a keyword.

And there’s nothing wrong with that loop code, provided that the Employee structure actually has an isEmpty member that you can assign 1 to.

It simply runs through a provided array (called list), setting each element in turn to be empty.

However, your manipulation of len seems a bit off, I suspect it won’t modify the last element in the list since you decrement it before running the loop.

I suspect a more canonical version (including that fix) would be something like:

int initEmployees(Employee* list, int len) {
    // Error if no elements in list.

    if (len < 1) return -1;

    // Mark each entry as empty.

    for (int i = 0 ; i < len ; i++) {
        list[i].isEmpty = 1;
    }

    // Everything is okay.

    return 0;
}

But I’d also question raising an error on a list size of zero. It seems to me that it’s perfectly okay to modify all elements of an empty list – that just involves doing nothing.

And, if you use unsigned values for sizes of things (e.g., size_t), your “negative” problem goes away.

Accepted Answer