Question

I’ve recently started playing around with ncurses.
As far as I understand, C doesn’t support passing by reference.

However, there are some functions that seem to exhibit such a behavior:

calling getmaxyx(stdscr, maxRow, maxCol); assigns the the number of rows and number of columns to maxRow and maxCol respectively. getyx seems to exhibit a similar behavior.

How is this done?

Answer 1

This is not a direct function call, but a macro, take a look here:

All of these interfaces are macros. A “&” is not necessary before the variables y and x.

For example:

#define getmaxyx(w, y, x)   (y) = getmaxy(w), (x) = getmaxx(w)