basic question about runtime query parsing

Say I have a c library which implements various database functions and
contains relevant data structures. For effeciency, I keep 'records' of
a 'table' in a nativ c struct (so 4 'columns' in a table will show up
as 4 attributes of a struct). I can understand how this will work if
all someone wants to do is do queries. But what is usually done for
'create table' command issued by a user?


By that I mean, if someone issues 'create table(x int, y int, z int),'
I parse it and figure out I need a struct{int x, int y, int z} (this
struct will then be passed all over the code). How do I create this
struct during runtime? One way I can think of is to output the struct
definition to a file, compile it on the fly and use it. There has to
be a better way since there are a HUGE number of langauges which use
compile down to C and they must run into this issue regularly. I'm
afraid the solution is stupidly simple...but somehow I've missed it.
Any ideas?


Falcon

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