Started With C !

Started with C

Communicating with a computer involves speaking the language the computer understands.

However, 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.  

The C Character Set

A character denotes any alphabet, digit or special symbol used to represent information.

Constants, Variables and Keywords

The alphabets, numbers and special symbols when properly combined form constants, variables and keywords. Let us see what are ‘constants’ and ‘variables’ in C. A constant is an entity that doesn’t change whereas a variable is an entity that may change.

In any program we typically do lots of calculations. The results of these calculations are stored in computers memory.

 Like human memory the computer memory also consists of millions of cells. The calculated values are stored in these memory cells.

To make the retrieval and usage of these values easy these memory cells (also called memory locations) are given names.

Since the value stored in each location may change the names given to these locations are called variable names. Consider the following example.

Here 4 is stored in a memory location and a name x is given to it. Then we are assigning a new value 6 to the same memory location x.

This would overwrite the earlier value 4, since a memory location can hold only one value at a time.

Since the location whose name is x can hold different values at different times x is known as a variable. As against this, 4 or 6 do not change, hence are known as constants.