The C Programming LanguageBryn Bodayle & Grant Yentzer

History of C

1972 at Bell Laboratories

Prior to B, BCPL, and FORTRAN

Unison with UNIX operating system

Finished in 1973

The C Programming Language

That which comes after B

C

Advantages at the Time

Similar syntax to B

Additions of structures and data-types

Block structure, easily understandable

Allows fine control of assembly language, access individual bits of information

Portability allowing for reuse of libraries

Advantages Today

TIOBE ranked as most popular language above Java & Objective-C

Basis for other languages: transferable to other languages

Standardization and continued development

Understand lower level mechanics i.e, arrays

int c = 4;

int y = 0; char value; if(c > 3) { y = c; value = 'A'; } else { c = y; c++; value = 'B'; } return value;

What language is this?

C, C++, C#, Java Objective-c

Assignment Gotchas

Order of functions matter

Pointers and arrays can be confusing

printf("always specifying a line break is annoying \n");

Static scope, static typing, no scope resolution operator, no overloading, no exception handling

Left to right function argument evaluation, short circuit evaluation, unions and structs

Dangling Else int x = 1; if(x != 4) if(x == 3) printf("not reached"); else printf("dangling else reached because the else is automatically attached to the innermost if statement \n");

Unionsunion UnionThing{ int i; char c;};

...

union UnionThing unionThing; unionThing.i = 30; unionThing.c = 'A'; //prints out the value stored in the struct printf("%c \n", unionThing.c); // output is "A" //only one value can be stored in a union at a time, so i is not 30, it is 65 which is A printf("%i \n", unionThing.i); // output is "65"

Why we chose C?