Showing the Use of Pointers in XDR Example

If a structure contains a person's name and a pointer to a gnumbers structure, which in turn specifies the person's gross assets and liabilities, the structure can be written as follows:

struct pgn {
    char *name;
    struct gnumbers *gnp;
};

The corresponding eXternal Data Representation (XDR) routine for this structure is:

bool_t
xdr_pgn(xdrs, pp)
    XDR *xdrs;
    struct pgn *pp;
{
    if (xdr_string(xdrs, &pp->name, NLEN) &&
      xdr_reference(xdrs, &pp->gnp,
      sizeof(struct gnumbers), xdr_gnumbers))
        return(TRUE);
    return(FALSE);
}