Introduction to C
C is a programming language developed at AT & T’s Bell Laboratories of USA
in 1972. It was 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.
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.
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.
Character set
A character denotes any alphabet, digit or special symbol used to represent
information. Valid alphabets, numbers and special symbols allowed in C are
Identifiers
Identifiers are user defined word used to name of entities like variables,
arrays, functions, structures etc.
Rules for naming identifiers are:
1) name should only consists of alphabets (both upper and lower case), digits
and underscore (_) sign.
2) first characters should be alphabet or underscore
3) name should not be a keyword
4) since C is a case sensitive, the upper case and lower case considered
differently, for example code, Code, CODE etc. are different identifiers.
5) identifiers are generally given in some meaningful name such as value,
net_salary, age, data etc.
An identifier name may be long, some implementation recognizes only first
eight characters, most recognize 31 characters. ANSI standard compiler
recognize 31 characters.
Some invalid identifiers are 5cb, int, res#, avg no etc.
