22 February 2012

Structure of C program



As previously mentioned C is a structured programming language. So we want to learn the structure of C to deal with C. When we write a program in We want to follow the following structure otherwise the program may not work properly.
Documentation Section
                        The Documentation section contains the comments and remarks. The comments consist of set of comment lines giving the name of the program or convey the logic of the steps of the programs. The comments are non-executable part of program and it should be enclosed between ‘/*’ and ‘*/’. Or for single line comments we use ‘//’ at the beginning of the line. The comments can appear anywhere in any size in a program. The comments are very useful and make it as a habit when writing the program. It will be useful to you and your followers latter. In our industry employee change occurs frequently, so the new employee may not think like you. The comments you made it may help him/her to complete the task.
Example:
/* This is a sample program*/
Preprocessor directives
The preprocessors is a program that process the source code before it pass through the compiler (Compiler is a program that convert high level language in to machine readable form). The source code is examined by the preprocessor for any directive. If  any directives are present ,appropriate action will taken. Then the source code is passed to the compiler. The preprocessor directives begins with a ‘#’ symbol. And the preprocessor directives may classified under three categories.
1. Macro Substitution (# define directive)
                        It is used to define constants, formulas etc
                        Example:  #define pi 3.1416
                        (Replace all occurrence of pi with 3.1416)
2. File inclusion (# include directive)
                   It is used to include file contents.
                        Example:  #include<stdio.h>
                        (Inserts the entire contents of the file stdio.h into the source code)
3. Compiler control directive (# if)
                   It is used as a checking statement.
(checks the expression after #if, if it is true all the statements between ‘{‘ and ‘}’ will be executed.)
                        Example:  #if x=10{y=20} # end if.
                        (if x=10 then the statement y=20 will be executed)

Global variable declaration
            Global variables are variables, which are declare at the beginning of the program. That means outside of all functions even the main function. Its scope is throughout the program and hence it can be accessible by all the part of the program. These variables are available as long as the program alive.
Example
int x,y ;
main()
{
            Statements;
}
(here x,y are two integer variables with global scope).
   
The main( ) function
            Every C program must have one main( ) function. This section contains two parts, declaration part and the execution part. The declaration part declares all the variables used in the execution part.
These two part contain with in the opening and the closing braces. The program execution begins at opening brace and end at closing brace. The closing brace of main function is the logical end of the program. All the statements in the declaration and  execution part terminate with a semicolon. And our C follows top to bottom execution approach. That is execution begins at top of the program here opening brace of main function and end at bottom. That is closing brace of main function.
Example:
                        [code]
                        #include<stdio.h>
                        Main()
                        {
                                    int x;
                                    x=10;
                                    printf(“%d”,x);
                        }
                        [/code]

Header files
There are some files with extension ‘.h’. It is generally used with #include preprocessor directive. These files are called header files. These files contain information that assist the compiler in checking the code being compiled for syntax and other errors.
They are of two forms
                        #include<filename>
                        #include “filename”
Angle brackets are used for generic header files and the compiler look it in the environment space. Double quotes are used for user defined header files. That is we can make header files, which we can include a file name that is use full in all our programs. It must be precompiled and error free.
The following are commonly used header files.
Stdio.h
            It contains the input output functions, data types, and macros are defined in ‘stdio.h’. And  its expansion is like standard input output functions.
String.h
            String functions such as strcmp( ), strlen( ), strcpy( ) are defined in this header file.
Math.h
            Mathematical functions are defined in this header file.
For more header files refer the following links
Ok we can go through a simple program with the above structure
[code]
/*A sample program */
#include<stdio.h>
main()
{
Pritf(“This is my first program”);
}
[/code]

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