Best practices for number of arguments for subroutines in C

Question

I've recently started working on developing APIs written in C. I see some subroutines which expect 8(Eight) parameters and to me it looks ugly and cumbersome passing 8 parameters while calling that particular subroutine. I was wondering if something more acceptable and cleaner way could be implemented .

Answer 1

If a number of arguments can be logically grouped together you may consider creating a structure containing them and simply pass that structure as an argument. For example instead of passing two coordinate values x and y you could pass a POINT structure instead.

But if such a grouping isn't applicable, then any number of arguments should be fine if you really need them, although it might be a sign that your function does a little too much and that you could spread work over more, but smaller functions.