C - Basic Syntax

You have seen the basic structure of a C program, so it will be easy to

understand other basic building blocks of the C programming language.

Tokens in C
A C program consists of various tokens and a token is either a keyword,
an identifier, a constant, a string literal, or a symbol. For example, the
following C statement consists of five tokens
printf("Hello, World! \n");

The individual tokens are

printf
(
"Hello, World! \n"
)
;

Semicolons
In a C program, the semicolon is a statement terminator. That is, each
individual statement must be ended with a semicolon. It indicates the end
of one logical entity.Given below are two different statements

printf("Hello, World! \n");

return 0;

Comments
Comments are like helping text in your C program and they are ignored
by the compiler. They start with /* and terminate with the characters */
as shown below

/* my first program in C */

You cannot have comments within comments and they do not occur within
a string or character literals.

Identifiers
A C identifier is a name used to identify a variable, function, or any other
user-defined item. An identifier starts with a letter A to Z, a to z, or an
underscore '_' followed by zero or more letters, underscores, and digits (0
to 9).

C does not allow punctuation characters such as @, $, and % within

identifiers. C is a case-sensitive programming language.
Thus, Manpower and manpower are two different identifiers in C. Here are
some examples of acceptable identifiers

mohd zara abc move_name a_123

myname50 _temp j a23b9 retVal

Keywords
The following list shows the reserved words in C. These reserved words
may not be used as constants or variables or any other identifier names.

auto else long switch

break enum register typedef

case extern return union

char float short unsigned

const for signed void

continue goto sizeof volatile

default if static while

do int struct _Packed

double

Whitespace in C
A line containing only whitespace, possibly with a comment, is known as a
blank line, and a C compiler totally ignores it.
Whitespace is the term used in C to describe blanks, tabs, newline
characters and comments. Whitespace separates one part of a statement
from another and enables the compiler to identify where one element in a
statement, such as int, ends and the next element begins. Therefore, in
the following statement
int age;

there must be at least one whitespace character (usually a space) between

int and age for the compiler to be able to distinguish them. On the other
hand, in the following statement

fruit = apples + oranges; // get the total fruit

no whitespace characters are necessary between fruit and =, or between

= and apples, although you are free to include some if you wish to increase
readability.

C - Data Types
Data types in c refer to an extensive system used for declaring variables
or functions of different types. The type of a variable determines how
much space it occupies in storage and how the bit pattern stored is
interpreted.
The types in C can be classified as follows

S.N. Types & Description

1 Basic Types

They are arithmetic types and are further classified into: (a) integer types
and (b) floating-point types.

2 Enumerated types

They are again arithmetic types and they are used to define variables that
can only assign certain discrete integer values throughout the program.
3
The type void

The type specifier void indicates that no value is available.

4
Derived types

They include (a) Pointer types, (b) Array types, (c) Structure types, (d)
Union types and (e) Function types.

The array types and structure types are referred collectively as the
aggregate types. The type of a function specifies the type of the function's
return value. We will see the basic types in the following section, where as
other types will be covered in the upcoming chapters.

Integer Types
The following table provides the details of standard integer types with their
storage sizes and value ranges

Type Storage size Value range

char 1 byte -128 to 127 or 0 to 255

unsigned char 1 byte 0 to 255

signed char 1 byte -128 to 127

int 2 or 4 bytes -32,768 to 32,767 or -2,147,483,648 to

2,147,483,647

unsigned int 2 or 4 bytes 0 to 65,535 or 0 to 4,294,967,295

short 2 bytes -32,768 to 32,767

unsigned short 2 bytes 0 to 65,535

long 4 bytes -2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647

unsigned long 4 bytes 0 to 4,294,967,295

To get the exact size of a type or a variable on a particular platform, you

can use the sizeof operator. The expressions sizeof(type) yields the
storage size of the object or type in bytes. Given below is an example to
get the size of int type on any machine

#include <stdio.h>
#include <limits.h>

int main() {

printf("Storage size for int : %d \n", sizeof(int));

return 0;
}

When you compile and execute the above program, it produces the
following result on Linux

Storage size for int : 4

Floating-Point Types
The following table provide the details of standard floating-point types with
storage sizes and value ranges and their precision

Type Storage size Value range Precision

float 4 byte 1.2E-38 to 3.4E+38 6 decimal places

double 8 byte 2.3E-308 to 1.7E+308 15 decimal places

long double 10 byte 3.4E-4932 to 1.1E+4932 19 decimal places

The header file float.h defines macros that allow you to use these values
and other details about the binary representation of real numbers in your
programs. The following example prints the storage space taken by a float
type and its range values

#include <stdio.h>
#include <float.h>
int main() {

printf("Storage size for float : %d \n", sizeof(float));

printf("Minimum float positive value: %E\n", FLT_MIN );
printf("Maximum float positive value: %E\n", FLT_MAX );
printf("Precision value: %d\n", FLT_DIG );

return 0;
}

When you compile and execute the above program, it produces the
following result on Linux

Storage size for float : 4

Minimum float positive value: 1.175494E-38
Maximum float positive value: 3.402823E+38
Precision value: 6

The void Type

The void type specifies that no value is available. It is used in three kinds
of situations

S.N. Types & Description

1
Function returns as void
There are various functions in C which do not return any value or you can
say they return void. A function with no return value has the return type as
void. For example, void exit (int status);

2 Function arguments as void

There are various functions in C which do not accept any parameter. A
function with no parameter can accept a void. For example, int rand(void);

3 Pointers to void
A pointer of type void * represents the address of an object, but not its type.
For example, a memory allocation function void *malloc( size_t size
); returns a pointer to void which can be casted to any data type.