Structure of a C Program

Course Leader:
Jishmi Jos Choondal

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 Objectives
• At the end of this lecture, student will be able to
– Explain the structure of a C program
– Explain the building blocks of C programs

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 Contents
• Introduction to C programming
• Tokens, keywords, identifiers and constants
• Expressions, Blocks and Statements

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 Program Development Cycle

Analyze the problem

Design the solution algorithm

Design the user interface

Write the code

Test and debug the program

Complete the documentation

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 C Language
• Developed by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Laboratory
• Procedure oriented language
• Evolved from B, which evolved from BCPL

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 Phases of C Programs

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 Structure of a C Program
Documentation section /*This is a program to calculate perimeter
of circle */
link section #include<stdio.h>
definition section #define PI 3.14
Global declaration section float area(float);

main() function int main(int argc, char *argv[]){

Braces printf(“Perimeter of circle with radius
statements %f is %f\n”,2.0f,area(2.0));
….. }
user defined functions float area(float radius){
return 2*PI*radius;
}
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 main() Function
• main() is a part of every C program
• C programs contain one or more functions, one of which
must be main
• Every program in C begins executing at the main()

• Block – the pair of braces {} and the portion of program

between the braces

• Statement terminator – every statement must end with a ;

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 Question
• We all know one or more human languages. What is a
human language made up of?
– Alphabets
– Words
– Sentences
– Paragraphs
• A computer program
– Character set
– Tokens
– Statements
– Functions

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 Character Set
• Alphabets
 Lower case letters – a to z
 Upper case letters – A to Z

• Digits
 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

• Special characters
~ % | @ + < _ - > ^ # = & $ / ( * \ ) ′ : [ “ ; ] ! , { ?
. }

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 C Tokens
• C tokens : the smallest individual units
 Keyword – float, while, for, int,….
 Identifier – main( ) , amount, sum, …
 Constants – -13.5, 500, …
 Strings – “ABC”, “MCA”, …
 Operators – + - * % …
 Special Symbols – [ ] { }…

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 Keywords used in C
• Fixed meaning, cannot be changed
• Reserved words
• Cannot be used as a variable or function name
• Basic building blocks
• All in Lowercase

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 Keywords used in C contd.

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 Identifiers
• Name given to a function or variable memory location
• An identifier is a series of characters consisting of letters,
digits and underscores “_”
• Should start with a letter or underscore
• Can be any length
– only the first 31 characters are required to be recognized by
ANSI C compilers
– Keep identifiers 31 characters or less for portability and fewer
problems

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 Identifiers - Examples
• CAN
– contain a number elsewhere h2o
– be of mixed cases Xsquared
– contain or begin with an underscore _height_

• CANNOT
– start with a number 2i
– contain any arithmetic operators r*s+t
– contain any other punctuation marks #@x%£!!a
– be a C keyword struct
– contain a space my var

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 Constants
• Fixed values
• Does not changes during execution of program
• Numeric constant – Integer (decimal, octal, hexadecimal)
and Real
• Character constant :
– Single character constant
– String constant
– Backslash character constant

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 Escape Sequence
• Escape character – backslash \
• When encountering a backslash in a string, the compiler
looks ahead at the next character and combines it with \
to form escape sequence

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 Common Escape Sequences

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 Summary
• All C programs follow a predefined structure
• Words of a computer programming language are known
as Tokens
– They can be Reserved Keywords, Identifiers, Operators and
Constants
• Expressions are a collection of operands and operators
• Statements are always terminated
• Statements can be composed of declarations, expressions,
control structures or a function call

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 Further Reading
Allain, A. (2005) Introduction to C, available at
http://www.cprogramming.com/tutorial/c/lesson1.html (accessed
22 July 2014).
Kernighan, B. W. and Richie, D. (1992) The C Programming Language.
2nd ed., New Delhi:PHI.

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