Lecture 1

1.1 Basics of C: Introduction to C

C is a programming language developed at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories of USA in 1972. It as
designed and written by a man named Dennis Ritchie. In the late seventies C began to replace
the more familiar languages of that time like PL/I,ALGOL, etc.

ANSI C standard emerged in the early 1980s, this book was split into two titles: The original
was still called Programming in C, and the title that covered ANSI C was called Programming
in ANSI C. This was done because it took several years for the compiler vendors to release
their ANSI C compilers and for them to become ubiquitous. It was initially designed for
programming UNIX operating system. Now the software tool as well as the C compiler is
written in C.

Major parts of popular operating systems like Windows, UNIX, Linux is still written in
C. This is because even today when it comes to performance (speed of execution)
nothing beats C. Moreover, if one is to extend the operating system to work with new
devices one needs to write device driver programs. These programs are exclusively
written in C. C seems so popular is because it is reliable, simple and easy to use. often
heard today is – “C has been already superceded by languages like C++, C# and Java.

Program
There is a close analogy between learning English language and learning C language. The
classical method of learning English is to first learn the alphabets used in the language, then
learn to combine these alphabets to form words, which in turn are combined to form sentences
and sentences are combined to form paragraphs. Learning C is similar and easier. Instead of
straight-away learning how to write programs, we must first know what alphabets, numbers
and special symbols are used in C, then how using them constants, variables and keywords are
constructed, and finally how are these combined to form an instruction. A group of instructions
would be combined later on to form a program. So a computer program is just a collection of
the instructions necessary to solve a specific problem. The basic operations of a computer
system form what is known as the computer’s instruction set. And the approach or method that
is used to solve the problem is known as an algorithm.

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There are two broad categories of programming languages:
1) Low level language
2) High level language

Low level language:

Low level languages are machine level and assembly level language. In machine level language
computer only understand digital numbers i.e. in the form of 0 and 1. So, instruction given to
the computer is in the form binary digit, which is difficult to implement instruction in binary
code. This type of program is not portable, difficult to maintain and also error prone. The
assembly language is on other hand modified version of machine level language. Where
instructions are given in English like word as ADD, SUM, MOV etc. It is easy to write and
understand but not understand by the machine. So the translator used here is
assembler to translate into machine level. Although language is bit easier, programmer has to
know low level details related to low level language. In the assembly level language the data
are stored in the computer register, which varies for different computer. Hence it is not portable.

High level language:

These languages are machine independent, means it is portable. The language in this category
is Pascal, Cobol, Fortran etc. High level languages are understood by the machine. So it need
to translate by the translator into machine level. A translator is software which is used to
translate high level language as well as low level language in to machine level language.

Three types of translator are there:

Compiler
Interpreter
Assembler

Compiler and interpreter are used to convert the high level language into machine level
language. The program written in high level language is known as source program and the
corresponding machine level language program is called as object program. Both compiler and
interpreter perform the same task but there working is different. Compiler read the program at-
a-time and searches the error and lists them. If the program is error free then it is converted

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into object program. When program size is large then compiler is preferred. Whereas interpreter
read only one line of the source code and convert it to object code. It checks for errors statement
by statement and hence of take more time.

Integrated Development Environments (IDE)

The process of editing, compiling, running, and debugging programs is often managed by a
single integrated application known as an Integrated Development Environment, or IDE for
short. An IDE is a windows-based program that allows us to easily manage large software
programs, edit files in windows, and compile, link, run, and debug programs.

On Mac OS X, CodeWarrior and Xcode are two IDEs that are used by many programmers.
Under Windows, Microsoft Visual Studio is a good example of a popular IDE. Kylix is a
popular IDE for developing applications under Linux. Most IDEs also support program
development in several different programming languages in addition to C, such as C# and C++.

1.2 Structure of C Language program

1) Comment line
2) Preprocessor directive
3) Global variable declaration

4) main function( )
{
Local variables;
Statements;
}
User defined function
}
}

Comment line
It indicates the purpose of the program. It is represented as
/* multiline comment goes here */ for multi-line comments, and
// for single line comment.

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Comment line is used for increasing the readability of the program. It is useful in explaining
the program and generally used for documentation. It is enclosed within the decimeters.
Comment line can be single or multiple line but should not be nested. It can be anywhere in
the program except inside string constant & character constant.

Preprocessor Directive:

#include<stdio.h> tells the compiler to include information about the standard input/output
library.
It is also used in symbolic constant such as #define PI 3.14(value).

The stdio.h (standard input output header file) contains definition & declaration of system
defined function such as printf( ), scanf( ), pow( ) etc.

Generally printf() function used to display and scanf() function used to read value

Global Declaration:
This is the section where variable are declared globally so that it can be access by all the
functions used in the program. And it is generally declared outside the function : main().

It is the user-defined function and every function has one main() function from where actually
program is started and it is encloses within the pair of curly braces. The main( ) function can
be anywhere in the program but in general practice it is placed in the first position.

Syntax :
main()
{
……..
……..
……..
}
The main( ) function return value when it declared by data type as

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int main( )
{
return 0
}
The main function does not return any value when void (means null/empty) as

void main(void ) or void main()

{
printf (“C language”);
}

Output: C language

The program execution start with opening braces and end with closing brace. And in between
the two braces declaration part as well as executable part is mentioned. And at the end of each
line, the semi-colon is given which indicates statement termination.

/*First c program with return statement*/

#include <stdio.h>
int main (void)
{
printf ("welcome to c Programming language.\n");
return 0;
}
Output: welcome to c programming language.

Steps for Compiling and executing the Programs

A compiler is a software program that analyzes a program developed in a particular

computer language and then translates it into a form that is suitable for execution on a particular
computer system. Figure below shows the steps that are involved in

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entering, compiling, and executing a computer program developed in the C programming
language and the typical Unix commands that would be entered from the command line.

Step 1: The program that is to be compiled is first typed into a file on the
computer system. There are various conventions that are used for naming files,
typically be any name provided the last two characters are “.c” or file with
extension .c. So, the file name prog1.c might be a valid filename for a C program.
A text editor is usually used to enter the C program into a file. For example, vi is a
popular text editor used on Unix systems. The program that is entered into the file
is known as the source program because it represents the original form of the
program expressed in the C language.

Step 2: After the source program has been entered into a file, then proceed to have
it compiled. The compilation process is initiated by typing a special command on
the system. When this command is entered, the name of the file that contains the
source program must also be specified. For example, under Unix, the command to
initiate program compilation is called cc. If we are using the popular GNU C
compiler, the command we use is gcc.

Typing the line gcc prog1.c or cc prog1.c

In the first step of the compilation process, the compiler examines each program
statement contained in the source program and checks it to ensure that it conforms
to the syntax and semantics of the language. If any mistakes are discovered by the
compiler during this phase, they are reported to the user and the compilation
process ends right there. The errors then have to be corrected in the source program
(with the use of an editor), and the compilation process must be restarted. Typical
errors reported during this phase of compilation might be due to an expression that
has unbalanced parentheses (syntactic error), or due to the use of a variable that is
not “defined” (semantic error).

Step 3: When all the syntactic and semantic errors have been removed from the
program, the compiler then proceeds to take each statement of the program and

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translate it into a “lower” form that is equivalent to assembly language program
needed to perform the identical task.

Step 4: After the program has been translated the next step in the compilation
process is to translate the assembly language statements into actual machine
instructions. The assembler takes each assembly language statement and converts it
into a binary format known as object code, which is then written into another file
on the system. This file has the same name as the source file under Unix, with the
last letter an “o” (for object) instead of a “c”.

Step 5: After the program has been translated into object code, it is ready to be
linked. This process is once again performed automatically whenever the cc or gcc
command is issued under Unix. The purpose of the linking phase is to get the program into a
final form for execution on the computer. If the program uses other programs that were
previously processed by the compiler, then during this phase the programs are linked together.
Programs that are used from the system’s program library are also searched and linked together
with the object program during this phase.

The process of compiling and linking a program is often called building.

The final linked file, which is in an executable object code format, is stored in
another file on the system, ready to be run or executed. Under Unix, this file is
called a.out by default. Under Windows, the executable file usually has the same
name as the source file, with the c extension replaced by an exe extension.

Step 6: To subsequently execute the program, the command a.out has the effect of loading
the program called a.out into the computer’s memory and initiating its execution. When the
program is executed, each of the statements of the program is sequentially executed in turn.
If the program requests any data from the user, known as input, the program temporarily
suspends its execution so that the input can be entered. Or, the program might simply wait
for an event, such as a mouse being clicked, to occur. Results that are displayed by the
program, known as output, appear in a window, sometimes called the console. If the program
does not produce the desired results, it is necessary to go back and reanalyze the program’s

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logic. This is known as the debugging phase, during which an attempt is made to remove all
the known problems or bugs from the program. To do this, it will most likely be necessary to
make changes to original source program.

/* Simple program to add two numbers…………………….*/

#include <stdio.h>
int main (void)
{
int v1, v2, sum; //v1,v2,sum are variables and int is data type
declared
v1 = 150;
v2 = 25;
sum = v1 + v2;
printf ("The sum of %i and %i is= %i\n", v1, v2, sum);
return 0;
}
Output:
The sum of 150 and 25 is=175

Reference:
Lecture Notes on “Programming in C”, Asst. Prof. Etuari Oram, Asst. Prof. Mr Bighnaraj Naik