C LANGUAGE - OVERVIEW C - VARIABLES

C LANGUAGE - OVERVIEW

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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 application programs have been written in C. 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 the early 1970s.
• The language was formalized in 1988 by the American National Standard Institute ANSI$ANSI$.
• The UNIX OS was totally written in C.
• Today C is the most widely used and popular System Programming Language.
• Most of the state-of-the-art software have been implemented using C.
• Today's most popular Linux OS and RDBMS MySQL have been written in C.

Why use C?

C was initially used for system development work, particularly 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 the 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.


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C - VARIABLES

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A variable is nothing but a name given to a storage area that our programs can manipulate. Each variable in C has a specific type, which determines the size and layout of the variable's memory; the range of values that can be stored within that memory; and the set of operations that can be applied to the variable.
The name of a variable can be composed of letters, digits, and the underscore character. It must begin with either a letter or an underscore. Upper and lowercase letters are distinct because C is case-sensitive. Based on the basic types explained in the previous chapter, there will be the following basic variable types −

Sr.No.	Type & Description
1	char Typically a single octetonebyte$onebyte$. This is an integer type.
2	int The most natural size of integer for the machine.
3	float A single-precision floating point value.
4	double A double-precision floating point value.
5	void Represents the absence of type.

Basic types

Here's a table containing commonly used types in C programming for quick access.

Type	Size (bytes)	Format Specifier
int	at least 2, usually 4	%d
char	1	%c
float	4	%f
double	8	%lf
short int	2 usually	%hd
unsigned int	at least 2, usually 4	%u
long int	at least 4, usually 8	%li
long long int	at least 8	%lli
unsigned long int	at least 4	%lu
unsigned long long int	at least 8	%llu
signed char	1	%c
unsigned char	1	%c
long double	at least 10, usually 12 or 16	%Lf

C programming language also allows to define various other types of variables, which we will cover in subsequent chapters like Enumeration, Pointer, Array, Structure, Union, etc. For this chapter, let us study only basic variable types.

Variable Definition in C

A variable definition tells the compiler where and how much storage to create for the variable. A variable definition specifies a data type and contains a list of one or more variables of that type as follows −

type variable_list;

Here, type must be a valid C data type including char, w_char, int, float, double, bool, or any user-defined object; and variable_listmay consist of one or more identifier names separated by commas. Some valid declarations are shown here −

int    i, j, k;
char   c, ch;
float  f, salary;
double d;

The line int i, j, k; declares and defines the variables i, j, and k; which instruct the compiler to create variables named i, j and k of type int.
Variables can be initialized assignedaninitialvalue$assignedaninitialvalue$ in their declaration. The initializer consists of an equal sign followed by a constant expression as follows −

type variable_name = value;

Some examples are −

extern int d = 3, f = 5;    // declaration of d and f. 
int d = 3, f = 5;           // definition and initializing d and f. 
byte z = 22;                // definition and initializes z. 
char x = 'x';               // the variable x has the value 'x'.

For definition without an initializer: variables with static storage duration are implicitly initialized with NULL allbyteshavethevalue0$allbyteshavethevalue0$; the initial value of all other variables are undefined.

Variable Declaration in C

A variable declaration provides assurance to the compiler that there exists a variable with the given type and name so that the compiler can proceed for further compilation without requiring the complete detail about the variable. A variable definition has its meaning at the time of compilation only, the compiler needs actual variable definition at the time of linking the program.
A variable declaration is useful when you are using multiple files and you define your variable in one of the files which will be available at the time of linking of the program. You will use the keyword extern to declare a variable at any place. Though you can declare a variable multiple times in your C program, it can be defined only once in a file, a function, or a block of code.

Example

Try the following example, where variables have been declared at the top, but they have been defined and initialized inside the main function −
Live Demo

#include <stdio.h>

// Variable declaration:
extern int a, b;
extern int c;
extern float f;

int main () {

   /* variable definition: */
   int a, b;
   int c;
   float f;
 
   /* actual initialization */
   a = 10;
   b = 20;
  
   c = a + b;
   printf("value of c : %d \n", c);

   f = 70.0/3.0;
   printf("value of f : %f \n", f);
 
   return 0;
}

When the above code is compiled and executed, it produces the following result −

value of c : 30
value of f : 23.333334

The same concept applies on function declaration where you provide a function name at the time of its declaration and its actual definition can be given anywhere else. For example −

// function declaration
int func();

int main() {

   // function call
   int i = func();
}

// function definition
int func() {
   return 0;
}

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1. Special characters
• Special characters in 'C' are shown in the given table,

, (comma)	{ (opening curly bracket)
. (period)	} (closing curly bracket)
; (semi-colon)	[ (left bracket)
: (colon)	] (right bracket)
? (question mark)	( (opening left parenthesis)
' (apostrophe)	) (closing right parenthesis)
" (double quotation mark)	& (ampersand)
! (exclamation mark)	^ (caret)
|(vertical bar)	+ (addition)
/ (forward slash)	- (subtraction)
\ (backward slash)	* (multiplication)
~ (tilde)	/ (division)
_ (underscore)	> (greater than or closing angle bracket)
$ (dollar sign)	< (less than or opening angle bracket)
% (percentage sign)	# (hash sign)