Introduction to C Programming Language

C is a programming language developed by AT & T’s Bell Laboratories of USA in 1972. It was designed and written by a man named Dennis Ritchie. C is reliable, simple and easy to use. C has survived for more than 3 decades. C language is a base to learn different programming language. If you want to learn C++ or JAVA, without the knowledge of C it becomes very difficult to learn these programming languages. Many major components of popular operating systems like Windows, UNIX, LINUX is still written in C. Nothing beats C in terms of speed of execution.

Before starting with the programming, let’s have a look at the C Character set.
Any alphabet, digit or special symbol can be termed as a character. Below table shows list of valid alphabets, digits and symbols allowed in C.

Alphabets:
A, B, C, D, … ,X, Y, Z
a, b, c, d, … ,x, y, z

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

Special Symbols :
~ ‘ ! @ # % ^ & * ( ) _ - + = | \ { }
[ ] : ; " ' < > , . ? /

Following are the basic data types:
1) Numeric data type: deals with numeric data such as integer or float data type
2) Non-numeric data type: deals with non numeric data such as characters.
3) Integer data type: deals with integer or whole number
4) Real data type: deals with numeric data that includes fractions
5) Enumerated data type: These data types are defined by the user.