Introducing the need for complex structures

We have explored C's intrinsic types – integers, floats/doubles, Booleans, and characters. We have also explored C's custom types – structures and enumerations. We have seen how a structure is a single instance of a grouping of intrinsic types to represent a set of related characteristics of something. Additionally, we have explored C's collection type, arrays, which are groups containing all the same type of thing.

Each of the data types we have explored more or less represents real-world objects that we may wish to manipulate. More often, however, real-world things are far more complicated. Therefore, these types alone may not adequately represent the real-world object we want to model and manipulate. So, we need to learn how to combine structures with arrays and arrays of structures to be able to represent a much broader set of real-world things. In doing so, we can model them and then manipulate them with...