BIRLA INSTTUTE OF TECHNOLOGY & SCIENCE, PILANI (RAJ.

)
CS F111 Computer Programming

LAB SESSION #3
(Writing basic C Programs)
We will start implementing and executing C programs from today’s lab. All labs, henceforth,
shall focus on programming in C. We expect you to clearly understand how to create files
using sublime text and access/edit them on the unix terminal, either in WSL or in ubuntu.
Please follow the video instructions of lab session 2 if you are not familiar with it.

Create a dedicated directory “myprogs” in your home directory if you are an ubuntu user or
in ‘D’ (or ‘E’ or any) drive of windows if you are a WSL user. You can create/edit your C
program related files using sublime text and store them in “myprogs” directory. You can
create a directory inside “myprogs” for this particular lab, say a directory with the name
“lab3”.

We will write our first C Program in this lab. Please revise the lecture slides of lectures 3-4
(module 2) before you start. The basic structure of a C program is explained there. The
explanation includes what are the header files, printf, scanf, etc. We will use them to
write our programs in this lab. Let us begin.

1. Write a program that prints “Hello World!”.

In this program we will use the printf statement to print “Hello World!”. Here is the
program:

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
printf(“Hello World!”);
return 0;
}

Create a file hello_world.c in the directory “lab3” using sublime text editor and copy this
program into it and save the file. Please note that all your C programs must be stored in
files with extension “.c”, just like you store text files with extension “.txt” C compiler needs
the files where programs are stored to be with the .c extension. C compiler also files with
“.h” extension, which we will see in futher lab sessions.

On your terminal, navigate to “lab3” directory (follow instructions in videos of lab session 2
to understand how to navigate there). Then run the following commands:

$ gcc hello_world.c
$ ./a.out

You will see that “Hello World!” is printed on the screen. However, the terminal prompt has
appeared beside the printed statement. To move the prompt to the next line, you shall need
to replace the printf statement with the following statement:

printf(“Hello World!\n”);

“\n” is the new line character that is used to move to the next line on the terminal.

Please note a few things in the program we just wrote. int main() is the definition of the
main function, which is the place from where any C program starts its execution. return 0
is the statement that states that my program has terminated and I can come out of the
execution. Any arbitrary C Program you write starts with int main and should contain
return statement at the end.
Also, when you compiled your program with gcc hello_world.c command, it creates an
executable with the name a.out. You can do an ls command after compilation to see that it
actually got created. And then you execute that executable using the command ./a.out.
This executed the program and performs the intended task of the program, which in our
case is printing of “Hello World!” statement.

Okay, let us now advance further into our second program for today. In this program we
will see how to add two numbers and print their sum. Here it is:

2. Write a program to add two numbers and print its sum.

In this program, we will make use of integer variables to store the numbers. A variable is
nothing but a placeholder for a value that you want to store. Let us see the following
program:

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
int num1, num2, num3;
num1 = 2;
num2 = 4;
num3 = num1 + num2; // computing the sum of num1 and num2
printf(“The sum is: %d \n”, num3); // printing the sum
return 0;
}

Create a file sum.c in the directory “lab3” using sublime text editor and copy this program
into it and save the file. Then compile it using gcc sum.c and execute it with ./a.out.

In this program we had used the variables num1, num2 and num3, which are of the type int
(or integer). int variables in C can hold both negative and positive integers. In this
program, we store the value 2 in the variable num1, value 4 in the variable num2, compute
the sum of num1 and num3 store in the variable num3. Then we print the value of num3 using
the printf statement. Please note that “%d” in the above printf statement indicates that
the value we are trying to print is of the type “int” (or integer). This is known as a format
specifier. We shall have to use “%f” for printing float values, “%lf” for printing double values
and “%c” to print characters, which we will see in further lecture and lab sessions.

Alright, we have seen how to compute sum of two numbers and print its value. Now, the
user wishes to give the values of num1 and num2 during the runtime, instead of giving their
values while writing the program. For this we can use the scanf statement that scans for
input from the user and stores the value in a variable. Let us see in the next program:

3. Take input of two numbers from the user and print their sum.

Here is the program:

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
int num1, num2, num3;
printf(“Please enter the first number:”);
scanf(“%d”, &num1); // captures an integer value and stores in num1
printf(“Please enter the second number:”);
scanf(“%d”, &num2); // captures an integer value and stores in num2
num3 = num1 + num2; // computing the sum of num1 and num2
printf(“The sum is: %d \n”, num3); // printing the sum
return 0;
}
Create a file sum2.c in the directory “lab3” using sublime text editor and copy this program
into it and save the file. Then compile it using gcc sum2.c and execute it with ./a.out.
Please note that each time you create compile a new file, the old a.out is replaced with a
new a.out specific to the most recently compiled program. If you want to keep a separate
executable for each program, then follow the following commands:

$ gcc sum2.c -o sum2_exe

The executable that got created after compilation of sum2.c is now sum2_exe instead of
a.out. And you can execute this by ./sum2_exe.

The above program, takes two values from the user, prints its sum. Note the syntax of the
scanf() statement:

scanf(“%d”,&num1);

This indicates that the value you are scanning is an integer (%d) and you want to store that
value in num1 by specifying the address of num1. Address is nothing but the location in the
main memory where num1 is stored. The address of a variable is accessed by prefixing &
symbol before the variable name. In this case we had used &num1 to denote the address of
the variable num1 in the main memory, which you had passed as input to the scanf
statement for it to store the scanned value into num1. This is how scanf works.

Now, let us try to write a few programs by ourselves using simple printf, scanf
statements, integer variables and operations over integer variables. A few operations over
integer variables include:

Addition:
num3 = num1 + num2

Substraction:
num3 = num1 - num2

Multiplication:
num3 = num1 + num2

Integer Division:
num3 = num1 / num2

Modulus (or remainder after division)

4. Write a C program to calculate the total distance travelled by a vehicle in “t” seconds,
given by: d = ut + ½ at2. Get user input for u, a and t. Output the value of d. You can
create intermediate variables to store intermediate values. For example you can create a
temporary variable temp1 to store the multiplication of u and t, and another temporary
variable temp2 to store ½ at2. And then add temp1 and temp2 to get the value of d.

5. Take the above C program and copy it without the .c extension (Hint: use the cp
command on Linux). Now try compiling this copy. Some C compilers will complain;
others will not. On Unix systems, the complaint may be quite cryptic. What happens on
your system?

6. Type the following code in your system and observe the format of the output printed by
various printf statement in the program
 #include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
char ch = 'A'; char str[20] = "Computer";
float flt = 10.234; int no = 150; double dbl = 20.123456;
printf("Character is %c \n", ch);
printf("String is %s \n" , str);
printf("Float value is %f \n", flt);
printf("Integer value is %d\n" , no);
printf("Double value is %lf \n", dbl);
printf("Octal value is %o \n", no);
printf("Hexadecimal value is %x \n", no);
return 0;
}

Please note various types of format specifiers used to print various types of values.

7. Make the following changes in the code written in question 4 and observe the effect of
each change on the compilation process:

a) Delete a semicolon and see what happens.

8. This exercise is meant for you to explore and learn more about printf() format
specifiers. Try each of these and infer what is the meaning:

Additional Practice Exercise

1. Write a C program that reads in an integer denoting number of days. It prints the
number of years, number of months and the number of days that constitute the input
number of days. For example, if the input number is 403, it should print 1(year), 1(month),
13(days). For simplicity: there is no need to consider leap years and assume all months
have 30 days. [Hint: Use modulus (%) and division (/) operators. End of Hint]

2. There are four main stages through which a source code is passed in order to finally get a
runnable executable. They are: pre-processing, compilation, assembly and linking. By
invoking gcc command, all these steps are accomplished, and you get the resultant
executable in a.out. You can stop this pipeline at a specific stage by giving specific options
for gcc.
For instance, try gcc –S lab3_1.c for just invoking the assembler. The assembly code for
the C program is now generated and stored in lab3_1.s that you can inspect using sublime
text. You may not understand the statements, but you should learn to identify how an
assembly program looks like.