NIST

signature

(definition)

Definition: The types or domains, and order, in some representations, of inputs to and outputs from a function.

Note: For instance, the signature of the C library function strncmp() (compare up to n characters of two strings) is int (char *, char *, int). That is, it takes two C strings and an integer, and returns an integer.

Author: PR


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Entry modified 17 December 2004.
HTML page formatted Mon Feb 2 13:10:40 2015.

Cite this as:
Patrick Rodgers, "signature", in Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures [online], Vreda Pieterse and Paul E. Black, eds. 17 December 2004. (accessed TODAY) Available from: http://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/signature.html