Basic details of C language in one Click

Origin of C

In 1970 a programmer, Dennis Ritchie, created a new language called C.

• The name came about because it superseded the old programming language he was using : B.
• C was designed with one goal in mind: writing operating systems.
• The language was extremely simple and flexible, and soon was used for many different types of programs.
• It quickly became one of the most popular programming languages in the world.

Features of C

• Fast and Efficient
  Programs written in C are efficient and fast. This is due to its variety of data type and powerful operators.
• Portable
  C is highly portable. This means that programs once written can be run on another machines with little or no modification.
• Function and Rich Libraries
  C program is basically a collection of functions that are supported by C library. We can also create our own functions and add it to the C library.
• Modularity
  Modular programming is a software design technique that increases the extent to which software is composed of separate parts, called modules.
• Easy to Extend
  In C, New feature can be added at any time by programmer.
• Case Sensitive
  It is a case sensitive language, that it can differentiate the character is upper case or lower case.

IDE AND COMPILER

List of some good IDE + Compiler for C.

Code::Blocks with Mingw (We Recommend this)

• Download Link : http://www.codeblocks.org/downloads
• Available on : Windows, Linux, Mac.

It's Free

Dev C++ with Mingw/GCC

• Download Link : http://www.bloodshed.net/dev/devcpp.html
• Available on : Windows.

It's Free

Xcode

• Download Link : https://developer.apple.com/xcode/downloads/
• Available on : Mac.

It's Free

What is Compiler:

A compiler is a computer program that transforms human readable source code of another computer program into the machine readable code that a CPU can execute.

What is Interpreter:

An interpreter is a computer program that directly executes, i.e. performs, instructions written in a programming or scripting language, without previously compiling them into a machine language program.

• Interpreter Takes Single instruction as input.
• No Intermediate Object Code is Generated.
• Interpreter execute conditional control statements at a much slower speed.
• Memory Requirement is Less.
• Every time higher level program is converted into lower level program.
• Errors are displayed for every instruction interpreted (if any).
• The interpreter can immediately execute high-level programs, thus interpreters are sometimes used during the development of a program, when a programmer wants to add small sections at a time and test them quickly.

Structure of C program

• C is a case sensitive language.
• C Program consist of one or more functions.
• One function that must be present in every C program is main(). This is the 1st function called up when program execution begins.

C program basically consists of the following parts:

• Preprocessor Commands
• Functions
• Variables
• Statements & Expressions
• Comments

Structure of C Program is illustrated below :

//Preprocessor directives

//Global data declarations

main() // main function
{
    //Declaration part;

    //Program statements;

}

//User defined functions
func1()
{
    ....
}

func2()
{
    ....
}

.
.
.

funcn()
{
    ....
}
    

Simple C program

Let's write c program to print Hello World.

PROGRAM CODE

/*Program to print a Hello World*/

//header file
#include<stdio.h>

//main function
int main()
{
    //Output statement
    printf("Hello World");

    //returning value to function
    return 0;
}