TUTORIAL C

Gordon Dodrill

Nov 21, 1987

• Contents
• Introduction
• Getting Started
  • What is an identifier ?
  • What about the underline ?
  • How this tutorial is written
  • A discussion of some of the files ccl.bat
• Getting started in C
  • Your first c program
  • A program that does something
  • Another program with more output
  • Lets print some numbers
  • How do we print numbers
  • How do we add comments in C
  • Good formatting style
  • Programming exercises
• Program Control
  • The while loop
  • The do-while loop
  • The for loop
  • The if statement
  • Now for the if-else
  • The switch statement
  • Finally, a meaningful program
  • Another poor programming example
  • Programming exercises
• Assignment and Logical compares
  • Integer assignment statements
  • Additional data types
  • Data type mixing
  • How to use the new data types
  • Lots of variable types
  • The conversion characters
  • Logical compares
  • More compares
  • Additional compare concepts
  • Logical evaluation
  • Precedence of operators
  • This is a trick, be careful
  • Potential problem areas
  • The cryptic part of C
  • The cryptic arithmetic operator
  • The conditional expression
  • To be cryptic or not to be cryptic
  • Programming exercises
• Functions, variables, and prototypes
  • Our first user defined function
  • Defining the functions
  • Passing a value to a function
  • More about passing a value to a function
  • Now to confess a little lie
  • Floating point functions
  • There is a bug in the first version of Turbo C
  • Scope of variables
  • More on "automatic" variables
  • What are static variables?
  • Using the same name again
  • What is a register variable?
  • Where do i define variables?
  • What is prototyping?
  • Standard function libraries
  • What is recursion ?
  • What did it do ?
  • Another example of recursion
  • How to work around the Turbo C (v1.0) bug
  • Programming exercises
• Defines and Macros
  • Defines and macros are aids to clear programming
  • Is this really useful ?
  • What is a macro ?
  • Lets look at a wrong macro
  • What is an enumeration variable ?
  • Programming exercises
• Strings and Arrays
  • What is a string ?
  • What is an array ?
  • How do we use the string ?
  • Outputting part of a string
  • Some string subroutines
  • Alphabetical sorting of strings
  • Combining strings
  • An array of integers
  • An array of floating point data
  • Getting data back from a function
  • Arrays pass data both ways
  • A hint at a future lesson
  • Multiply dimensioned arrays
  • Programming exercises
• Pointers
  • What is a pointer ?
  • Another pointer
  • There is only one variable
  • How do you declare a pointer ?
  • The second program with pointers
  • A string variable is actually a pointer
  • Pointer arithmetic
  • Function data return with a pointer
  • Pointers are valuable
  • Programming exercises
• Standard Input/Output
  • The stdio.h header file
  • Input/output operations in c
  • Other include files
  • Back to the file named "simpleio.c"
  • Dos is helping us out (or getting in the way)
  • Another strange I/O method
  • Now we need a line feed
  • Now to read in some integers
  • Character string input
  • Input/Output programming in C
  • In memory I/O
  • Is that really useful ?
  • Standard error output
  • What about the exit(4) statement?
  • Programming exercise
• File Input/Output
  • Output to a file
  • Opening a file
  • Reading ("r")
  • Writing ("w")
  • Outputting to the file
  • Closing a file
  • The "putc" function
  • Reading a file
  • Caution Caution Caution
  • Reading a word at a time
  • This is a problem
  • Finally, we read a full line
  • How to use a variable filename
  • How do we print ?
  • Programming exercises
• Structures and Unions
  • What is a structure ?
  • A single compound variable
  • Assigning values to the variables
  • How do we use the resulting data ?
  • An array of structures
  • A recent upgrade to the C language
  • We finally display all of the results
  • Using pointers and structures together
  • Pointer arithmetic
  • Nested and named structures
  • Two more variables
  • How to use some of the fields
  • More about structures
  • What are unions ?
  • Another union example
  • A new concept, the typedef
  • What do we have now ?
  • What is a bitfield ?
  • What is the bitfield good for ?
  • Programming exercises
• Dynamic Allocation
  • What is dynamic allocation ?
  • Dynamic variable creation
  • What is a heap ?
  • More about segments
  • Back to the "malloc" function
  • What is a cast ?
  • Getting rid of the dynamically allocated data
  • That was a lot of discussion
  • An array of pointers
  • A linked list
  • The data definitions
  • The first field
  • Filling additional structures
  • Printing the data out
  • More about dynamic allocation and linked lists
  • Another new function - calloc
  • Programming exercises
• Character and Bit Manipulation
  • Upper and lower case
  • Classification of characters
  • The logical functions
  • The shift instructions
• Example Programs
  • Why this chapter ?
  • dosex.c - The DOS Example Program
  • whatnext.c - The Batch File Interrogator
  • list.c - The Program Lister
  • vc.c - The Visual Calculator
• About this document ...