On 3 June 2017 at 03:13, Alistair Leslie-Hughes leslie_alistair@hotmail.com wrote:
The purpose is to make a type. For example without it every time we needed to use it we would have to use "struct _mfmediatype name", but with the typedef we can shorthand it to "mfmediatype name".
That's a rather poor justification for using typedefs, but unfortunately also a really common one. What you're essentially doing is obfuscating the fact that something is a structure/enum/integer/pointer/etc., only to avoid a few keystrokes. One of the reasons that's odd is that the time spent typing in the code should be small compared to the time spent thinking about the problem you're trying to solve.
That's not to say there's never a legitimate reason to use a typedef though. For example, a certain type may be implemented as a 32-bit integer on one platform, a 64-bit integer on another, and a structure on others. A typedef can be used to abstract between those by creating an opaque type, like e.g. time_t. Such cases should be rare however.