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History
•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.
•C is a successor of B language which was introduced around the
early 1970s.
• Thelanguage was formalized in 1988 by the American National
Standard Institute (ANSI).
• The UNIX OS was totally written in C.
• Today's most popular Linux OS and RDBMS MySQL have been
written in C.
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Features of ‘C’
• Portable
• Procedural / Modular
• Structured Language
• Statically typed
• Middle level language

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Character Set
• Every language has its own character set.
• ‘C’ language has its own character set.
• ‘C’
program basically consists of keywords, identifiers, constants,
operators and some special symbols.
• The characters that can be used in a ‘C’ program are Alphabets (A
– Z and a – z), Digits (0 – 9), Special characters (~ ! @ # $ % ^ & *
( ) [ ] { } ; : ‘ “ , . < > / ? \ |) and White space characters (Space,
Tab, New Line, Form feed etc).

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 Tokens in C
• Keywords
• Whose meaning is fixed and is known by the compiler, cannot change the
meaning of keyword. These are reserved words of the C language. For
example int, float, if, else, for, while etc.
• In C, we have 32 keywords, which have their predefined meaning and cannot
be used as a variable name.

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 Tokens in C
• Constants
• Whose value does not change throughout the program.
• Numeric Constants
• Integer constants like 13, -15, 0, +15 etc.
• Real constants like 0.004, -0.34, 0.4e-2 etc.

• Non-numeric constants / Character constants

• Single Character constants : ‘B’, ‘a’, ‘5’, ‘+’ etc.
• Back slash constants are special type of character constants which actually
consists of two characters. These are known as escape sequences. Escape
sequences start with backslash ‘\’ character. E.g. ‘\t’ – horizontal tab, ‘\n’ -
newline etc.
• String constants: “Computer”, “-345”, “B” etc.

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Tokens in C
• Identifiers
• An Identifier is a sequence of letters and digits, but must start with a
letter. Underscore ( _ ) is treated as a letter. Identifiers are case sensitive.
Identifiers are used to name variables, functions etc.
• Characters Allowed :
• Underscore(_)
• Capital Letters ( A –Z )
• Small Letters ( a –z )
• Digits ( 0 –9 )
• Blanks & Commas are not allowed
• No Special Symbols other than underscore(_) are allowed
• First Character should be alphabet or Underscore
• Variable name Should not be Reserved Word
• Valid: Root, _getchar, __sin, x1, x2, x3, x_1, If
• Invalid: 324, short, price$, My Name

• String Literals
• A sequence of characters enclosed in double quotes as “…”. For example
“13” is a string literal and not number 13. ‘a’ and “a” are different. 7
Tokens in C
• Operators
• Arithmetic operators like +, -, *, / ,% etc.
• Logical operators like ||, &&, ! etc. and so on.
• White Spaces
• Spaces, new lines, tabs, comments ( A sequence of characters
enclosed in /* and */ ) etc. These are used to separate the adjacent
identifiers, kewords and constants.

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Escape Sequences
Escape Sequences Character
\b Backspace
\f Form feed
\n Newline
\r Return
\t Horizontal tab
\v Vertical tab
\\ Backslash
\’ Single quotation mark
\” Double quotation mark
\? Question mark
\0 Null character 9
Tokens in c

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Structure of ‘C’ program

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 A Simple C Program:
Printing a Line of Text
1 /* Printing a line of text
2 A first program in C */
3 #include <stdio.h>
4
5 int main()
6 {
7 printf( "Welcome to C!\n" );
8
9 return 0;
10 }
• Comments
• Text surrounded by /* and */ is ignored by computer
• Used to describe program

• #include <stdio.h>
• Preprocessor directive
• Tells computer to load contents of a certain file
• <stdio.h> allows standard input/output operations

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A Simple C Program:
Printing a Line of Text
• int main()
• C++ programs contain one or more functions, exactly one of which
must be main
• Parenthesis used to indicate a function
• int means that main "returns" an integer value
• Requires a return statement at the end of the function
• Braces ({ and }) indicate a block
• The bodies of all functions must be contained in braces

• void main ( )
• Indicates no return type of main ( ) function.
• Does not require the return statement at the end of the function.

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A Simple C Program:
Printing a Line of Text
• printf( "Welcome to C!\n" );
• Instructs computer to perform an action
• Specifically, prints the string of characters within quotes (“ ”)
• Entire line called a statement
• All statements must end with a semicolon (;)
• Escape character (\)
• Indicates that printf should do something out of the ordinary
• \n is the newline character

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A Simple C Program:
Printing a Line of Text
• return 0;
• A way to exit a function
• return 0, in this case, means that the program terminated normally

• Right brace }
• Indicates end of main has been reached
• Linker
• When a function is called, linker locates it in the library
• Inserts it into program
• If function name is misspelled, the linker will produce an error
because it will not be able to find function in the library

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Procedure of execution of ‘C’
program

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Variables
• Naming a Variable
• Must be a valid identifier.
• Must not be a keyword
• Names are case sensitive.
• Variables are identified by only first 32 characters.
• Library commonly uses names beginning with _.
• Naming Styles: Uppercase style and Underscore style
• lowerLimit lower_limit
• incomeTax income_tax

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Declarations
• Declaring a Variable
• Each variable used must be declared.
• A form of a declaration statement is
data-type var1, var2,…;
• Declaration announces the data type of a variable and allocates
appropriate memory location. No initial value (like 0 for integers)
should be assumed.
• It is possible to assign an initial value to a variable in the declaration
itself.
data-type var = expression;
• Declaration and Initialization Examples
int sum = 0;
char newLine = ‘\n’;
float epsilon = 1.0e-6;

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Data Types in C
• “Datatype can be defined as the type of data of variable or
constant store.”
• When we use a variable in a program then we have to mention
the type of data. This can be handled using data type in C.

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Basic Data Types
• Primitive or fundamental data types
• Integer data types
• Floating-point data types
• Character data type
• void data type

• Derived data types

• Arrays
• Pointers
• Structures

• User-defined data types

• typedef
• enum

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Basic Data Types
• Integer data types

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Basic Data Types
• Floating Point Numbers
• Floating point numbers are rational numbers. Always signed numbers.
• float
• Typically stored in 4 bytes
• Value range : 1.2E-38 to 3.4E+38
• double
• Typically stored in 8 bytes
• Value range : 2.3E-308 to 1.7E+308

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Character Types
char ch = ‘a’;
int i;
i = ‘a’; /* i is now 97 */
ch = 65; /* ch is now ‘A’ */
ch = ch + 1; /* ch is now ‘B’ */
ch++; /* ch is now ‘C’ */
 PRINTING data ON SCREEN
• Forprinting values of variables is to output data on screen using the
printf function.
• The format is:
• printf(“control string”, variable1, variable2, … );
• The control string contains the format of the data being received. Also
called “Format specifier”.
• variable1, variable2 specifies the variables whose values are needed to be
outputted.

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 Reading data from keyboard
• Forgiving values to variables is to input data from keyboard using
the scanf function.
• The format is:
• scanf(“control string”, &variable1, &variable2, … );
• The control string contains the format of the data being received.
• The ampersand symbol & before each variable name is an operator that
specifies the variable name’s address.

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 User defined data types
• “type definition” allows users to define an identifier that would
represent an existing data type.
• The user-defined data type identifier can later be used to declare
variables.
• It takes the general form:
• typedef type identifier;
• Where “type” refers to an existing data type and “identifier” refers to the
new name given to the data type.
• Remember that the new type is “new” only in name, but not the data type,
typedef cannot create a new type.
• E.g.
• typedef int units;
• typedef float marks;

• Now, units symbolizes int and marks symbolizes float.

• units marks1, marks2;

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 Defining symbolic constants
• When a constant is used at many places in a program, due to some
reason if the value of that constant needs to be changed, then we
need to change at every statement where that constant occurs in the
program – so modification becomes difficult.
• The symbolic constant helps in solving these problems.
• Here,the constant is given a symbolic name and instead of constant
value, symbolic name is used in the program.
• It is defined as below:
• #define symbolic_name value
• #define PI 3.1415

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 User defined data types
• Enumerated data type
• We can define more than one integer symbolic constants.
• Syntax:
• enum identifier (value1, value2, … , value n);
• Example:
• enum day {sun, mon, tue, wed, thu, fri, sat};
• Here, enum is a keyword, day is a data type defined and the possible
values are as specified in brackets. So any variable declared of day type
can have values which we have specified within brackets.
• We can declare variable of enum type as
• enum day today;
• We can assign value to variable as
• today = sun;
• The compiler automatically assigns integer digits beginning with 0 to all
enumerated constants. For the above example, sun = 0, mon = 1, … and sat
= 6.

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 Type Conversions
• Type casting or type conversions is a way to convert a variable from one data
type to another data type.
• Whenever an expression involves two different types of operands, ‘C’
language applies the type conversion rules to evaluate an expression.
• At a time only one operator under consideration is taken.
• If the operands are of different type, then the operand with a lower type is
upgraded to the higher type and then the operation is performed.
• Types:
• Automatic type conversion (Implicit casting)
• Explicit type conversion : Also called type casting.

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 Automatic Type conversion
1. char and short operands are converted to int Hierarchy
2. Lower data types are converted to the higher data types
and result is of higher type. double
3. The conversions between unsigned and signed types float
may not yield intuitive results.
4. Example
long
float f; double d; long l; int
int i; short s;
short and
d + f f will be converted to double
char
i / s s will be converted to int
l / i i is converted to long; long result

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Automatic Type conversion

• a * c will be done first, here a will be upgraded to float because

other operand c is float.
• So, a*c will evaluate to 27.5. Then, d/10 will be evaluated, 10 will
be converted to 10.0 (double) because d is double. So, d/10 will
evaluate to 0.4. Then, 27.5 + 0.4 evaluates to 27.9. This value is
assigned to variable b, which is integer, so truncated value of
27.9 will be the value of b i.e. 27 will be assigned to b.
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Integer promotion
• Integerpromotion is the process by which values of integer type
"smaller" than int or unsigned int are converted either to int or
unsigned int. Consider an example of adding a character in an int:

• Here,value of sum is coming as 116 because compiler is doing

integer promotion and converting the value of 'c' to ascii before
performing actual addition operation.

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Explicit Type Conversion or Type Casting
• You can convert values from one type to another explicitly by using the cast
operator.
• The general form of a type casting operator is
• (type-name) expression
• Here, type-name is the name of the data type we want to convert the
expression to. The converted value is used during evaluation of expression
only, it does not change the basic data type of operands of an expression.
• float to int conversion causes truncation of fractional part

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Type Casting

• It
should be noted here that the cast operator has precedence
over division, so the value of sum is first converted to type
double and finally it gets divided by count yielding a double
value.

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Type Casting

• In the first line of output, integer arithmetic takes place, while in

second, sum which is 47 is converted into 47.0, so automatically i.e.
type conversion takes place and 10 becomes 10.0. So, floating-point
arithmetic takes place. While in the last line of output, float type
casting takes place on sum / n which is 4, converted into float
becomes 4.0.
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