Passing Values between Functions
The functions that we have used so far haven’t been very flexible. We call them and they do what they are designed to do. Like our mechanic who always services the motorbike in exactly the same way, we haven’t been able to influence the functions in the way they carry out their tasks. It would be nice to have a little more control over what functions do, in the same way it would be nice to be able to tell the mechanic, “Also change the engine oil, I am going for an outing”. In short, now we want to communicate between the ‘calling’ and the ‘called’ functions.
The mechanism used to convey information to the function is the ‘argument’. You have unknowingly used the arguments in the printf( ) and scanf( ) functions; the format string and the list of variables used inside the parentheses in these functions are arguments. The arguments are sometimes also called ‘parameters’.
There are two types by which we can pass a functions value to the called function :
- Call by value
- Call by reference
Follow the next tutorial for detailed reference to them
