ANSI C Programming

School of Mathematical Sciences

University of Bath

P J Willis (Email: P.J.Willis@uk.ac.bath)

To summarize the ANSI C programming language; to provide a basic reference manual for your later use of the language.

Master printed on: Tue Sep 27 15:32:01 BST 1994
Copyright ©1994 P J Willis

• Purpose
• Contents
• History and background
  • Brief history
  • Effect of technology
  • C in the Historical context
• C Programming
  • Programming languages
  • Style
  • Structure of a simple C program
  • Variables
    • C types
    • C type modifiers
  • Arithmetic expressions
    • Operator precedence
  • Notes
• Decisions
  • Statements and blocks
  • True and false
  • if-else
    • Dangling else
    • else-if
  • switch
  • while loop
  • for loop
  • do-while loop
  • Relational operators
  • Logical operators
  • Related issues
    • Use of break
    • Use of continue
    • Use of goto
• Procedures
  • Form of a function definition
  • Function names returning a value
  • A brief digression to non-ANSI C
  • Returning values via arguments
  • Recursion
  • Accessing items in C
    • Scope and extent
  • Linkage in C
    • No linkage
    • Internal linkage
    • External linkage
  • Definition and declaration
  • How automatic variables are managed
    • The stack
    • Creating and deleting automatic variables
    • Recursion
    • A warning
  • Program structure
    • Top-down design
    • Bottom-up design
• Data representation
  • Bits, nibbles, bytes, words
  • Representing characters
  • Representing integers
  • Representing floating point numbers
  • More about types
  • Bit operations
    • Some remarks on portability
• Arrays and Pointers
  • One-dimensional arrays
  • Arrays and pointers
  • Character strings
  • Passing arrays as parameters
  • Multi-dimensional arrays
  • Initializing variables and arrays
  • Arguments with main()
    • The command-line argument mechanism
  • Pointers to functions
• Input-Output
  • Simple formatted output
    • Conversion specification
    • Finer control of layout
      • Field widths
      • Dynamic control of field width
      • Escape characters for formatting
  • Simple formatted input
    • Conversion specification
  • Files
  • Getting access to a file
  • File output
  • File input
  • Redirection and pipes
    • Pipes
    • Redirection
• The C Preprocessor
  • define undef
  • include
  • if ifdef ifndef else endif
  • line
• Idiomatic C
  • bitcount()
  • Skip white space
  • Walking a linked list
  • Remove trailing spaces
  • strcat()
  • Computing a hash value
  • strcpy()
• About this document ...