Question

I have a function which takes a block of data and the size of the block and a function pointer as argument. Then it iterates over the data and performes a calculation on each element of the data block.
The following is the essential outline of what I am doing:

int myfunction(int* data, int size, int (*functionAsPointer)(int)){
    //walking through the data and calculating something
    for (int n = 0; n < size; n++){
        data[n] = (*function)(data[n]);
    }
}

The functions I am passing as arguments look something like this:

int mycalculation(int input){
    //doing some math with input
    //...
    return input;
} 

This is working well, but now I need to pass an additional variable to my functionpointer. Something along the lines

int mynewcalculation(int input, int someVariable){
    //e.g.
    input = input * someVariable;
    //...
    return input;
}

Is there an elegant way to achieve this and at the same time keeping my overall design idea?

Answer 1

The usual way to make it totally generic is with a void*, which of course causes all kinds of typesafety issues:

int map_function(int* data, int size, int (*f_ptr)(int, void*), void *userdata){
    //walking through the data and calculating something
    for (int n = 0; n < size; n++){
        data[n] = (*f_ptr)(data[n], userdata);
    }
}

int simple_calculation(int input, void *userdata) {
    // ignore userdata and do some math with input
    return input;
}

int calculation_with_single_extra_arg(int input, void *userdata) {
    int input2 = * (int*) userdata;
    // do some math with input and input2
    return input;
}

int calculation_with_many_extra_args(int input, void *userdata) {
    my_data_t data = (my_data_t *) userdata;
    return input * (input * data->a + data->b) + data->c;
}

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
    int array[100];
    my_data_t userdata = { 1, 2, 3 };

    populate(array, 100);

    map_function(data, calculation_with_many_extra_args, &userdata);
}

Any given function to be passed in must have that prototype, but you can shove any data you want in through userdata. There’s just absolutely no typechecking.

You could also use va_args as dbingham suggests; this isn’t really much different though, since the prototype for your function to map will have to be int(int, va_list).

Edit: I favor the void* approach. The va_list doesn’t add any typesafety anyway and adds more potential for user error (particularly calling va_end twice or not implementing the va_arg loop right). The void* also doesn’t add any extra lines of code; it’s passed cleanly through, and the user just dereferences it into (hopefully) the right type (which is probably a struct, in the general case).