Sam Key - C Programming Success in a Day!

When you look at the code used in C language, you will notice that it is highly structured, which makes it a bit easier to understand. It is actually a high level programming language, which means it uses some phrases and words that may be familiar or meaningful to human readers. Dennis Ritchie, the creator developed this programming language, he intended it to be a general purpose language. Eventually, it was used to develop the UNIX operating system. It was first implemented in 1972.

This means that all the Unix applications and the entire operating system itself was built on the foundation of the C programming language. Nowadays, this programming language is used to develop many different applications.

Benefits of Using C Language

The following are some of the benefits that have been cited by experts and other programmers who have used it:

• The code used for C language can be compiled on many different computer systems. It is not restricted to one type of system only.
• It is powerful enough to handle many low level computing activities.
• The programs that have been developed using this language have proven to be quite efficient.
• It is a structured language and you can easily decipher the meaning of the code.
• Many new programmers have found that the C language is really easy to learn.

Of course, there are a lot of other interesting facts about C language. It is the most widely used programming language to create various systems. It is the next step from the B language (1970). The entire language was formalized by ANSI (American National Standard Institute) in 1988.

C was initially designed to create operating systems. You have to understand that that fact alone presents a lot of serious advantages. For one thing, the code created using this language can run nearly as fast as some low level languages such as Assembly Language. However unlike Assembly, C is better structured and easier to learn even for anyone who has no background in programming. C language has been used in the development of utilities, language interpreters, data bases, more modern programs, network drivers, print spoolers, text editors, assemblers, language compilers, and operating systems.

Character Set and Reserved Words

C language uses a particular character set as well as other terms that are exclusive to the operation of the code. Some of these terms are user supplied, which means that the programmer has discretion on what terms to use for certain parts of the code. However, there are key words and reserved terms that cannot be used by a programmer since they provide a special meaning when they are compiled or translated into computer executable code.

The following are the characters that are allowed in C language: all upper case letters from A to Z, all lower case letters from a to z, and all digits from 0 to 9.

Note that there are special characters in C language that may not be freely used by programmers. These special characters have a different meaning in C language. The special characters include the following:

• \
• -
• |
• /
• *
• !
• ^
• "
• }
• {
• &
• '
• [
• ]
• %
• :
• $
• ;
• )
• (
• .
• >
• <

Characters Used to Indicate White Space

White space such as form feed, carriage return, tab, new lines, and blank spaces are also part of the language. They may be used with certain specifications.

Keywords

As stated earlier, there are certain terms that are important as to how the code is executed. These certain key words may not be coined by programmers. These are reserved terms and they have been defined by ANSI. They include the following: int, while, auto, volatile, break, void, case, unsigned, char, union, const, typedef, continue, switch, goto, default, struct, do, static, double, sizeof, else, signed, enum, short, extern, return, float, register, for, and long.

Note that these terms do not yet include key words that are used in other versions of C. Instance, Turbo C has these extra reserved terms: cdecl, huge, near, pascal, interrupt, far, and asm.

To give you some sort of idea what these terms mean, a few short definitions will be included below. Note that some of these terms will be discussed at length in other places of this book.

volatile

This is used to define an object in the code that can be modified by computer hardware. The modifications have no specifics.

void

This term is used to indicate that functions in C language will not make use of arguments thus these functions will not return or provide any value.

union

This term indicates that variables of different types are classed or included within a single name.

typedef

This part of the code associates an identifier to a type.