C

Programming is a beautiful art and science. The more you do it, the more you are fascinated by it(or bugged by it) It is crucial to understand the exact way a programming language works(not the “AI way” or “vibe coding” way to solve its “bugs”. A “bug” in computer parlance is a programming error.

The ‘C’ programming language is one of the earliest programming languages that I studied in my undergraduate days. I studied this language in my second year of my engineering degree. We were young and eager to learn and this one certainly challenged us. The ‘C’ programming language is so powerful that it is still taught in colleges today as well.

What makes it so powerful, is what you might think… Nothing much…except that the social media that you doom scroll on today is probably built on the ‘C’ programming language or its variants. Though the UNIX operating system was originally written in Assembly language, it was re-written in the ‘C’ programming language.

Here are a few features of the ‘C’ programming language:

1. It is a procedural language where the instructions are executed sequentially
2. It is a very powerful mid level language(a mid-level language bridges a high level language with a low level language)
3. It was developed by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Laboratories in 1972 for the creation of the UNIX operating system
4. Here are a few ‘C’ programming constructs:

a. Variables, keywords

b. Datatypes

c. Operators

d. Looping constructs

e. Functions

f. Arrays

g. Pointers

h, Memory management

i. File handling

Here is a sample ‘C’ program:

// Online C compiler to run C program online  -----> comment statement
#include <stdio.h>                            -----> This includes a library         

int main() {                           -----> 'C' pgm starts with a 'main'fn
    // Write C code here                   -------> Another comment statement   
    printf("Programming is fun :)");   ----> 'printf' is used to print output

    return 0;
}

It will be good to understand this program as such for now.

Once this program has been typed, it has to be compiled and then run.

‘Compilation’ is the process of converting the high level code to machine level code

Once the code is converted to machine level code, it has to be run.

You can compile and run this code via this site:

Online C Compiler – ProgramizOnline C Compiler – Programiz

You do have to tweak the already existing code to the above code

Once you run this code, you will get the following output:

Programming is fun

=== Code Execution Successful ===

which brings joy to any programmer!!

We will try and understand the various ‘C’ concepts through this challenge.

This post is a part of ‘Blogchatter Half Marathon’