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Sunday, February 7, 2010

C Programming Basic - Part 1

C is a widely used language to program, specially useful for learning basic concepts of porgramming. C uses various compilers. Each of these compilers is slightly different. Each one should support the ANSI standard C functions, but each compiler will also have nonstandard functions (these functions are similar to slang spoken in different parts of a country). Sometimes the use of nonstandard functions will cause problems when you attempt to compile source code (the actual C code written by a programmer and saved as a text file) with a different compiler. These tutorials use ANSI standard C and should not suffer from this problem; fortunately, since C has been around for quite a while, there shouldn't be too many compatability issues except when your compiler tries to create C++ code.

Every full C program begins inside a function called "main". A function is simply a collection of commands that do "something". The main function is always called when the program first executes. From main, we can call other functions, whether they be written by us or by others or use built-in language features. To access the standard functions that comes with your compiler, you need to include a header with the #include directive. What this does is effectively take everything in the header and paste it into your program. Let's look at a working program:
 
#include 
 

int main()
{
  printf( "Hello world!" );
  return 0;
}

Let's look at the elements of the program. The #include is a "preprocessor" directive that tells the compiler to put code from the header called stdio.h into our program before actually creating the executable. By including header files, you can gain access to many different functions ( the printf ) function is included in stdio.h.

The next imporant line is int main(). This line tells the compiler that there is a function named main, and that the function returns an integer, hence int. The "curly braces" ({ and }) indicate the beginning and end of the function.

The printf function is the standard C way of displaying output on the screen. The quotes tell the compiler that you want to output the literal string as-is (almost).

Finally, at the end of the program, we return a value from main to the operating system by using the return statement. This return value is important as it can be used to tell the operating system whether our program succeeded or not. A return value of 0 means success.

The final brace closes off the function.

Interesting isn't it ? Start playing around with this. To know about compiler, you may refer to here

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