C - Language Overview

C is a general-purpose, high-level language that was originally developed by Dennis M. Ritchie to develop the UNIX operating system at Bell Labs. C
was originally first implemented on the DEC PDP-11 computer in 1972.
In 1978, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie produced the first publicly available description of C, now known as the K&R standard.
The UNIX operating system, the C compiler, and essentially all UNIX applications programs have been written in C. The C has now become a widely
used professional language for various reasons.

Easy to learn

Structured language

It produces efficient programs.

It can handle low-level activities.

It can be compiled on a variety of computer platforms.

Facts about C

C was invented to write an operating system called UNIX.

C is a successor of B language which was introduced around 1970

The language was formalized in 1988 by the American National Standard Institute (ANSI).

The UNIX OS was totally written in C by 1973.

Today C is the most widely used and popular System Programming Language.

Most of the state-of-the-art softwares have been implemented using C.

Today's most popular Linux OS and RBDMS MySQL have been written in C.

Why to use C?
C was initially used for system development work, in particular the programs that make-up the operating system. C was adopted as a system
development language because it produces code that runs nearly as fast as code written in assembly language. Some examples of the use of C might
be:

Operating Systems

Language Compilers

Assemblers

Text Editors

Print Spoolers

Network Drivers

Modern Programs

Databases

Language Interpreters

Utilities

C Programs
A C program can vary from 3 lines to millions of lines and it should be written into one or more text files with extension ".c"; for example, hello.c. You
can use "vi", "vim" or any other text editor to write your C program into a file.
This tutorial assumes that you know how to edit a text file and how to write source code inside a program file.

Try it Option Online

You really do not need to set up your own environment to start learning C programming language. Reason is very simple, we already have set up C
Programming environment online, so that you can compile and execute all the available examples online at the same time when you are doing your
theory work. This gives you confidence in what you are reading and to check the result with different options. Feel free to modify any example and
execute it online.
Try following example using Try it option available at the top right corner of the below sample code box:
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
/* my first program in C */
printf("Hello, World! \n");
return 0;
}
For most of the examples given in this tutorial, you will find Try it option, so just make use of it and enjoy your learning.

Local Environment Setup

If you are still willing to set up your environment for C programming language, you need the following two softwares available on your computer, (a)
Text Editor and (b) The C Compiler.

Text Editor
This will be used to type your program. Examples of few editors include Windows Notepad, OS Edit command, Brief, Epsilon, EMACS, and vim or vi.
Name and version of text editor can vary on different operating systems. For example, Notepad will be used on Windows, and vim or vi can be used on
windows as well as Linux or UNIX.
The files you create with your editor are called source files and contain program source code. The source files for C programs are typically named with
the extension ".c".
Before starting your programming, make sure you have one text editor in place and you have enough experience to write a computer program, save it
in a file, compile it and finally execute it.

The C Compiler
The source code written in source file is the human readable source for your program. It needs to be "compiled", to turn into machine language so that
your CPU can actually execute the program as per instructions given.
This C programming language compiler will be used to compile your source code into final executable program. I assume you have basic knowledge
about a programming language compiler.
Most frequently used and free available compiler is GNU C/C++ compiler, otherwise you can have compilers either from HP or Solaris if you have
respective Operating Systems.
Following section guides you on how to install GNU C/C++ compiler on various OS. I'm mentioning C/C++ together because GNU gcc compiler works
for both C and C++ programming languages.

Installation on UNIX/Linux
If you are using Linux or UNIX, then check whether GCC is installed on your system by entering the following command from the command line:
$ gcc -v
If you have GNU compiler installed on your machine, then it should print a message something as follows:
Using built-in specs.
Target: i386-redhat-linux
Configured with: ../configure --prefix=/usr .......
Thread model: posix
gcc version 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-46)
If GCC is not installed, then you will have to install it yourself using the detailed instructions available athttp://gcc.gnu.org/install/
This tutorial has been written based on Linux and all the given examples have been compiled on Cent OS flavor of Linux system.

Installation on Mac OS
If you use Mac OS X, the easiest way to obtain GCC is to download the Xcode development environment from Apple's web site and follow the simple
installation instructions. Once you have Xcode setup, you will be able to use GNU compiler for C/C++.
Xcode is currently available at developer.apple.com/technologies/tools/.

Installation on Windows
To install GCC at Windows you need to install MinGW. To install MinGW, go to the MinGW homepage,www.mingw.org, and follow the link to the
MinGW download page. Download the latest version of the MinGW installation program, which should be named MinGW-<version>.exe.
While installing MinWG, at a minimum, you must install gcc-core, gcc-g++, binutils, and the MinGW runtime, but you may wish to install more.
Add the bin subdirectory of your MinGW installation to your PATH environment variable, so that you can specify these tools on the command line by
their simple names.
When the installation is complete, you will be able to run gcc, g++, ar, ranlib, dlltool, and several other GNU tools from the Windows command line.
Before we study basic building blocks of the C programming language, let us look a bare minimum C program structure so that we can take it as a
reference in upcoming chapters.

C Hello World Example

A C program basically consists of the following parts:

Preprocessor Commands

Functions

Variables

Statements & Expressions

Comments
Let us look at a simple code that would print the words "Hello World":
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
/* my first program in C */
printf("Hello, World! \n");
return 0;
}

Let us look various parts of the above program:

1.
2.

The first line of the program #include <stdio.h> is a preprocessor command, which tells a C compiler to include stdio.h file before going to actual
compilation.
The next line int main() is the main function where program execution begins.

3.

The next line /*...*/ will be ignored by the compiler and it has been put to add additional comments in the program. So such lines are called comments
in the program.

4.
5.

The next line printf(...) is another function available in C which causes the message "Hello, World!" to be displayed on the screen.
The next line return 0; terminates main()function and returns the value 0.

Compile & Execute C Program:

Lets look at how to save the source code in a file, and how to compile and run it. Following are the simple steps:
1.

Open a text editor and add the above-mentioned code.

2.

Save the file as hello.c

3.

Open a command prompt and go to the directory where you saved the file.

4.
5.
6.
7.

Type gcc hello.c and press enter to compile your code.

If there are no errors in your code the command prompt will take you to the next line and would generate a.out executable file.
Now, type a.out to execute your program.
You will be able to see "Hello World" printed on the screen
$ gcc hello.c
$ ./a.out
Hello, World!
Make sure that gcc compiler is in your path and that you are running it in the directory containing source file hello.c.
You have seen a basic structure of C program, so it will be easy to understand other basic building blocks of the C programming language.

Tokens in C
A C program consists of various tokens and a token is either a keyword, an identifier, a constant, a string literal, or a symbol. For example, the
following C statement consists of five tokens:
printf("Hello, World! \n");
The individual tokens are:
printf
(
"Hello, World! \n"
)
;

Semicolons ;
In C program, the semicolon is a statement terminator. That is, each individual statement must be ended with a semicolon. It indicates the end of one
logical entity.
For example, following are two different statements:
printf("Hello, World! \n");
return 0;

Comments
Comments are like helping text in your C program and they are ignored by the compiler. They start with /* and terminates with the characters */ as
shown below:

/* my first program in C */
You cannot have comments within comments and they do not occur within a string or character literals.

Identifiers
A C identifier is a name used to identify a variable, function, or any other user-defined item. An identifier starts with a letter A to Z or a to z or an
underscore _ followed by zero or more letters, underscores, and digits (0 to 9).
C does not allow punctuation characters such as @, $, and % within identifiers. C is a case sensitiveprogramming language.
Thus, Manpower and manpower are two different identifiers in C. Here are some examples of acceptable identifiers:
mohd
myname50

zara
_temp

abc
j

move_name
a23b9

a_123
retVal

Keywords
The following list shows the reserved words in C. These reserved words may not be used as constant or variable or any other identifier names.

auto

else

long

switch

break

enum

register

typedef

case

extern

return

union

char

float

short

unsigned

const

for

signed

void

continue

goto

sizeof

volatile

default

if

static

while

do

int

struct

_Packed

double

Whitespace in C
A line containing only whitespace, possibly with a comment, is known as a blank line, and a C compiler totally ignores it.
Whitespace is the term used in C to describe blanks, tabs, newline characters and comments. Whitespace separates one part of a statement from
another and enables the compiler to identify where one element in a statement, such as int, ends and the next element begins. Therefore, in the
following statement:
int age;
There must be at least one whitespace character (usually a space) between int and age for the compiler to be able to distinguish them. On the other
hand, in the following statement:
fruit = apples + oranges;

// get the total fruit

No whitespace characters are necessary between fruit and =, or between = and apples, although you are free to include some if you wish for
readability purpose.
In the C programming language, data types refer to an extensive system used for declaring variables or functions of different types. The type of a
variable determines how much space it occupies in storage and how the bit pattern stored is interpreted.

The types in C can be classified as follows:

S.N.

Types and Description

Basic Types:
They are arithmetic types and consists of the two types: (a) integer types and (b) floating-point types.

Enumerated types:
They are again arithmetic types and they are used to define variables that can only be assigned certain discrete integer values
throughout the program.

The type void:

The type specifier void indicates that no value is available.

Derived types:
They include (a) Pointer types, (b) Array types, (c) Structure types, (d) Union types and (e) Function types.

The array types and structure types are referred to collectively as the aggregate types. The type of a function specifies the type of the function's return
value. We will see basic types in the following section, whereas, other types will be covered in the upcoming chapters.

Integer Types
Following table gives you details about standard integer types with its storage sizes and value ranges:

Type

Storage size

Value range

char

1 byte

-128 to 127 or 0 to 255

unsigned char

1 byte

0 to 255

signed char

1 byte

-128 to 127

int

2 or 4 bytes

-32,768 to 32,767 or -2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647

unsigned int

2 or 4 bytes

0 to 65,535 or 0 to 4,294,967,295

short

2 bytes

-32,768 to 32,767

unsigned short

2 bytes

0 to 65,535

long

4 bytes

-2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647

unsigned long

4 bytes

0 to 4,294,967,295

To get the exact size of a type or a variable on a particular platform, you can use the sizeof operator. The expressions sizeof(type) yields the storage
size of the object or type in bytes. Following is an example to get the size of int type on any machine:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <limits.h>
int main()
{
printf("Storage size for int : %d \n", sizeof(int));
return 0;
}
When you compile and execute the above program it produces the following result on Linux:

Storage size for int : 4

Floating-Point Types
Following table gives you details about standard floating-point types with storage sizes and value ranges and their precision:

Type

Storage size

Value range

Precision

float

4 byte

1.2E-38 to 3.4E+38

6 decimal places

double

8 byte

2.3E-308 to 1.7E+308

15 decimal places

long double

10 byte

3.4E-4932 to 1.1E+4932

19 decimal places

The header file float.h defines macros that allow you to use these values and other details about the binary representation of real numbers in your
programs. Following example will print storage space taken by a float type and its range values:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <float.h>
int main()
{
printf("Storage size for float : %d \n", sizeof(float));
printf("Minimum float positive value: %E\n", FLT_MIN );
printf("Maximum float positive value: %E\n", FLT_MAX );
printf("Precision value: %d\n", FLT_DIG );
return 0;
}
When you compile and execute the above program, it produces the following result on Linux:
Storage size for float : 4
Minimum float positive value: 1.175494E-38
Maximum float positive value: 3.402823E+38
Precision value: 6

The void Type

The void type specifies that no value is available. It is used in three kinds of situations:

S.N.

Types and Description

Function returns as void

There are various functions in C which do not return value or you can say they return void. A function with no return value has
the return type as void. For example void exit (int status);

Function arguments as void

There are various functions in C which do not accept any parameter. A function with no parameter can accept as a void. For
example, int rand(void);

Pointers to void
A pointer of type void * represents the address of an object, but not its type. For example a memory allocation function void
*malloc( size_t size ); returns a pointer to void which can be casted to any data type.

The void type may not be understood to you at this point, so let us proceed and we will cover these concepts in the upcoming chapters.