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C Language Introduction

C is a procedural programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie. It was designed for system programming like operating system development due to its low-level access to memory and simple keywords. Many other languages are based on C's syntax and features. The structure of a C program includes header file inclusions, a main function declaration returning int, variable declarations before use, function bodies containing operations, and a return statement from main returning an int status code. A basic "Hello World" C program is shown that includes stdio.h, defines int main() returning 0, uses printf to output text, and returns 0 from main. It is compiled using compilers like GCC on Linux or CodeBlocks on Windows.

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Krishanu Modak
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139 views

C Language Introduction

C is a procedural programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie. It was designed for system programming like operating system development due to its low-level access to memory and simple keywords. Many other languages are based on C's syntax and features. The structure of a C program includes header file inclusions, a main function declaration returning int, variable declarations before use, function bodies containing operations, and a return statement from main returning an int status code. A basic "Hello World" C program is shown that includes stdio.h, defines int main() returning 0, uses printf to output text, and returns 0 from main. It is compiled using compilers like GCC on Linux or CodeBlocks on Windows.

Uploaded by

Krishanu Modak
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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C Language Introduction
C is a procedural programming language. It was initially developed by Dennis Ritchie in the year 1972. It was mainly developed as a system
programming language to write an operating system. The main features of C language include low-level access to memory, a simple set of
keywords, and clean style, these features make C language suitable for system programmings like an operating system or compiler
development.
Many later languages have borrowed syntax/features directly or indirectly from C language. Like syntax of Java, PHP, JavaScript, and many
other languages are mainly based on C language. C++ is nearly a superset of C language (There are few programs that may compile in C, but
not in C++).

Beginning with C programming:

1. Structure of a C program
After the above discussion, we can formally assess the structure of a C program. By structure, it is meant that any program can be written
in this structure only. Writing a C program in any other structure will hence lead to a Compilation Error.

The structure of a C program is as follows:

The components of the above structure are:

1. Header Files Inclusion: The rst and foremost component is the inclusion of the Header les in a C program.
A header le is a le with extension .h which contains C function declarations and macro de nitions to be shared between several
source les.
Some of C Header les:

stddef.h – De nes several useful types and macros.


stdint.h – De nes exact width integer types.
stdio.h – De nes core input and output functions
stdlib.h – De nes numeric conversion functions, pseudo-random network generator, memory allocation
string.h – De nes string handling functions
math.h – De nes common mathematical functions
Syntax to include a header le in C:

#include

2. Main Method Declaration: The next part of a C program is to declare the main() function. The syntax to declare the main function is:
Syntax to Declare main method:

int main()
{}

3. Variable Declaration: The next part of any C program is the variable declaration. It refers to the variables that are to be used in the
function. Please note that in the C program, no variable can be used without being declared. Also in a C program, the variables are to
be declared before any operation in the function.
Example:
int main()
{
int a;
.
.

4. Body: Body of a function in C program, refers to the operations that are performed in the functions. It can be anything like
manipulations, searching, sorting, printing, etc.
Example:

int main()
{
int a;

printf("%d", a);
.
.

5. Return Statement: The last part in any C program is the return statement. The return statement refers to the returning of the values
from a function. This return statement and return value depend upon the return type of the function. For example, if the return type is
void, then there will be no return statement. In any other case, there will be a return statement and the return value will be of the type
of the speci ed return type.
Example:

int main()
{
int a;

printf("%d", a);

return 0;
}

2. Writing rst program:


Following is rst program in C

#include <stdio.h>
int main(void)
{
    printf("GeeksQuiz");
    return 0;
}

Let us analyze the program line by line.


Line 1: [ #include <stdio.h> ] In a C program, all lines that start with # are processed by preprocessor which is a program invoked by the
compiler. In a very basic term, preprocessor takes a C program and produces another C program. The produced program has no lines
starting with #, all such lines are processed by the preprocessor. In the above example, preprocessor copies the preprocessed code of
stdio.h to our le. The .h les are called header les in C. These header les generally contain declaration of functions. We need stdio.h for
the function printf() used in the program.

Line 2 [ int main(void) ] There must to be starting point from where execution of compiled C program begins. In C, the execution typically
begins with rst line of main(). The void written in brackets indicates that the main doesn’t take any parameter (See this for more details).
main() can be written to take parameters also. We will be covering that in future posts.
The int written before main indicates return type of main(). The value returned by main indicates status of program termination. See this
post for more details on return type.

Line 3 and 6: [ { and } ] In C language, a pair of curly brackets de ne a scope and mainly used in functions and control statements like if,
else, loops. All functions must start and end with curly brackets.

Line 4 [ printf(“GeeksQuiz”); ] printf() is a standard library function to print something on standard output. The semicolon at the end of
printf indicates line termination. In C, semicolon is always used to indicate end of statement.

Line 5 [ return 0; ] The return statement returns the value from main(). The returned value may be used by operating system to know
termination status of your program. The value 0 typically means successful termination.
3. How to excecute the above program:
Inorder to execute the above program, we need to have a compiler to compile and run our programs. There are certain online compilers
like https://ide.geeksforgeeks.org/, http://ideone.com/ or http://codepad.org/ that can be used to start C without installing a compiler.
Windows: There are many compilers available freely for compilation of C programs like Code Blocks  and Dev-CPP.   We strongly
recommend Code Blocks.

Linux: For Linux, gcc comes bundled with the linux,  Code Blocks can also be used with Linux.

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