Elements of C programming

This is the second article of the series Learning C Programming Language.

Every language has some basic elements & grammatical rules. Before starting with programming,
we should be acquainted with the basic elements that build the language.

🔅 Character Set:

Communicating with a computer involves speaking the language the computer understands. In C,
various characters have been given to communicate.

Character set in C consists of :

Types	Character Set
Lower case	a-z
Upper case	A-Z
Digits	0-9
Special Character	!@#$%^&*
White space	Tab or new lines or space

🔅 Keywords:

Keywords are the words whose meaning has already been explained to the C compiler. The keywords cannot be used as variable names because if we do so we are trying to assign a new meaning to the keyword, which is not allowed by the computer.

There are only 32 keywords available in C. Below figure gives a list of these keywords for your

ready reference.

auto	break	case	char
const	continue	default	do
double	else	enum	extern
float	for	goto	if
int	long	register	return
short	signed	sizeof	static
struct	switch	typedef	union
unsigned	void	volatile	while

🔅 Identifier:

In the programming language C, an identifier is a combination of alphanumeric characters, the first being a letter of the alphabet or an underline, and the remaining being any letter of the alphabet, any numeric digit, or the underline.
Two rules must be kept in mind when naming identifiers.

The case of alphabetic characters is significant. Using "INDEX" for a variable is not the same as using "index" and neither of them is the same as using "InDeX" for a variable. All three refer to different variables.
As C is defined, up to 32 significant characters can be used and will be considered significant by most compilers. If more than 32 are used, they will be ignored by the compiler.

🔅 Datatype:

In the C programming language, data types refer to a domain of allowed values & the operations that can be performed on those values. The type of a variable determines how much space it occupies in storage and how the bit pattern stored is interpreted. There are 4 fundamental data types in C, which are- char, int, float &, double. Char is used to store any single character; int is used to store any integer value, float is used to store any single precision floating point number & double is used to store any double precision floating point number. We can use 2 qualifiers with these basic types to get more types.

There are 2 types of qualifiers-

Sign qualifier- signed & unsigned
Size qualifier- short & long

The data types in C can be classified as follows:

Type	Size		Value Range
char	1 byte	-128 to 127
unsigned char	1 byte	0 to 255
int	2 or 4 bytes	-32,768 to 32,767 Or -2,147,486,648 to 2,147,486,647
unsigned int	2 or 4 bytes	0 to 65,535 or 0 to 4,294,967,295
float	4 bytes	1.2E-38 to 3.4E+38 (6 decimal precision)
double	8 bytes	2.3E-308 to 1.7E+308 (15 decimal precision)
long double	10 bytes	3.4E-4932 to 1.1E+4932 (19 decimal precision)

Constants and Variables also are elements of C.
But we will discuss them in the next article. 😀

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Elements of C programming | Learn C | Village Programmer