Introduction to C Language

• The C character set,

identifiers and keywords, data
types, constants, symbolic
constants, variables and
declarations, operators,
expressions, statements,
Library Functions.
 C Language
• The programming language C is a general
purpose computer language.
• It is a structured, high-level and machine
independent language.
• It was originally created for the specific
purpose of writing Operating System
software.
 C Language
• The development in C has seen many
evolutionary processes.
• A lot of new features have been added to
make it more useful and powerful.
• C was evolved from ALGOL, BCPL and B
by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell
Laboratories in 1972.
 C Language
• The language became more popular after the
publication of the book ‘The C Programming
Language’ by Brain Kerningham and Dennis
Ritchie in 1978.
• To assure that the C language remains standard,
in 1983,
• American National Standards Institute (ANSI)
appointed a technical committee to define a
standard for C, the committee approved a
version of C in December 1989 which is now
known as ANSI C.
• It was then approved by the International
Standards Organization (ISO) in 1990.
 FUNDAMENTALS OF C
LANGUAGE
• The basic elements of C language can be
classified as follows:
• Identifiers
• Keywords
• Constants
• C Character set
 Identifiers
• Identifiers are names that are given to
various program elements, such as
variables, functions and arrays.
• Identifiers consist of letters and digits in
any order except that the first character
must be a letter.
 Identifiers
• To construct an identifier you must obey
the following points :
• Only alphabet, digit and underscores are
permitted
• An identifier can’t start with a digit.
• Identifiers are case sensitive, i.e.
uppercase and lower case letters are
distinct.
• Maximum length of an identifier is 32
characters.
 Keywords (Reserved words)
• Reserved words are the essential part of
a language definition.
• The meaning of these words has already
been explained to the C compiler.
• So you can’t use these reserved words as
a variable names.
• Since these reserved words have some
special meaning in C, therefore these
words are often known as “keyword”.
 Keywords (Reserved words)
auto double if static
break else int struct
case enum long switch
char extern near
typedef
const far register union
continue float return unsigned
default for short void
do goto signed while
 Constants
• A constant is a container to store value.
But you can’t change the value of that
container (constant) during the execution
of the program.
• Thus, the value of a constant remains
constant through the complete program.
 Constants
• There are two broad categories of constant in C,
literal constant and symbolic constant.
• A literal constant is just a value. For example, 10
is a literal constant. It does not have a name,
just a literal value.
• Depending of the type of data, literal constant is
of different type.
• They include integer, character and floating
point constant.
• Integer constant can again be subdivided into
decimal (base-10), octal (base-8), and
hexadecimal (base-16) integer constant.
 Constants
• One important variation of character
constant is string constant.
• Character constant is always enclosed
with single quotation mark, whereas a
string constant is always enclosed with a
double quotation mark.
• An octal integer constant always starts
with 0 and a hexadecimal constant with
0x.
 Constants
EXAMPLE TYPES
153 Decimal integer constant
015 Octal integer constant
0xA1 Hexadecimal integer constant
153.371 Floating point constant
‘a’ Character constant
‘1’ Character constant
“a” String constant
“153” String Constant
 SYMBOLIC CONSTANTS IN C
• A symbolic constant is a name that
substitutes for a sequence of characters.
• a symbolic constant allows a name to
appear in place of a numeric constant,
character constant or a string.
• When a program is compiled, each
occurrence of a symbolic constant is
replaced by its corresponding character
sequence.
 SYMBOLIC CONSTANTS IN C
• Symbolic constants are usually defined at
the beginning of a program.
• Symbolic constants are defined using
#define as given below:
#define<symbolic constant name> <value>
#define PI 3.14
#define TAXRATE 0.55
#define TRUE 1
#define FALSE 0
 Character Set
The only characters required by the C
Programming Language are
• Alphabets A – Z, a - z
• Digits 0 - 9
• Special symbols # & | ! ? _ ~ ^ { }
[ ] ( ) < >, space . , : ; ‘ $ “ + - /
* = %
BASIC DATA TYPES IN C
 Format
specifier or Conversion specifier
• The “%” symbol along with a (special)
character in known as format specifier
or conversion specifier.
• It indicates the data type to be printed or
scanned and how that data type is
converted to the character that appears
on the screen.
 Format
specifier or Conversion specifier
Format Specifier Usual VariableType - Display as
%c char single character
%d int signed integer
%f %lf float or double signed
decimal
%e %le float or double exponential
format
%o int unsigned octal value
%u int unsigned integer
%x int unsigned hex value
%ld int long decimal
integer
 VARIABLES AND THEIR
DECLARATIONS
• A variable is an identifier to store value.
• You can resemble a variable with a
container which takes different values at
different time during the execution of the
program.
• Thus, the value of the variable may change
within the program.
• A variable name can be chosen by the
programmer in a meaningful way that
reflects what it represents in the program.
• The naming convention of variable follows
the rule of constructing identifiers.
 VARIABLES AND THEIR
DECLARATIONS
int A ;
A = 153 ;
• The first statement says that A is a container,
where we can store only integer type
variable.
• This type of statement is known as
declaration statement (A declares that A can
store only integer type of variable).
The general form of declaration of a variable
is
data_type variable1, variable2, . . . . . ,
 VARIABLES AND THEIR
DECLARATIONS
By declaring a variable we tell 3 things to
the compiler :
– What the variable name is.
– What type of data the variable will
hold.
– and the scope of the variable.
You can store values to a variable in two
ways
– By using assignment statement.
– By using a read statement.
 OPERATORS
• Operators are special symbols which
instruct the compiler to perform certain
mathematical or logical manipulations.
• Operators are used in programs to
manipulate data and variables.
• The data items that operators act upon are
called operands.
• Operators are used with operands to build
expressions. Some operators require two
operands, while other act upon only one
operand.
 EXPRESSIONS
• C Expressions are based on algebra
expressions - they are very similar to what
we learn in Algebra, but they are not exactly
the same.
• An expression is a combination of variables,
constants and operators written according
to the syntax of C language.
• In C every expression evaluates to a value
i.e., every expression results in some value
of a certain type that can be assigned to a
variable.
 EXPRESSIONS
• Expressions in C are syntactically valid
combinations of operators and operands that
compute to a value determined by the priority
and associativity of the operators.
• Some examples of expressions:
float a, b, c x, y, z;
a = 9; // a variable
b = 12; c=3;
x = a – b / 3 + c * 2 – 1;
y = a – b / (3 + c) * (2 – 1);
z = a – ( b / (3 + c) * 2) – 1;
 EXPRESSIONS
printf (“x = %fn”,x);
printf (“y = %fn”,y);
printf (“z = %fn”,z);
Output
x = 10.00
y = 7.00
z = 4.00
 Rules for evaluation of
expression
• First parenthesized sub expression left to
right are evaluated.
• If parenthesis are nested, the evaluation
begins with the inner most sub expression.
• The precedence rule is applied in
determining the order of application of
operators in evaluating sub expressions.
 Rules for evaluation of
expression
• The associability rule is applied when two
or more operators of the same
precedence level appear in the sub
expression.
• Arithmetic expressions are evaluated
from left to right using the rules of
precedence.
• When Parenthesis are used, the
expressions within parenthesis assume
highest priority.