Text Editor
This will be used to type your program. Examples of few a editors include Windows Notepad, OS Edit command, Brief, Epsilon, EMACS, and vim or vi.
The name and version of text editors can vary on different operating systems. For example, Notepad will be used on Windows, and vim or vi can be used on windows as well as on Linux or UNIX.
The files you create with your editor are called the source files and they contain the program source codes. The source files for C programs are typically named with the extension ".c".
Before starting your programming, make sure you have one text editor in place and you have enough experience to write a computer program, save it in a file, compile it and finally execute it.
The C Compiler
The source code written in source file is the human readable source for your program. It needs to be "compiled", into machine language so that your CPU can actually execute the program as per the instructions given.
The compiler compiles the source codes into final executable programs. The most frequently used and free available compiler is the GNU C/C++ compiler, otherwise you can have compilers either from HP or Solaris if you have the respective operating systems.
The following section explains how to install GNU C/C++ compiler on various OS. We keep mentioning C/C++ together because GNU gcc compiler works for both C and C++ programming languages.
Installation on UNIX/Linux
If you are using Linux or UNIX, then check whether GCC is installed on your system by entering the following command from the command line −
$ gcc -v
If you have GNU compiler installed on your machine, then it should print a message as follows −
Using built-in specs. Target: i386-redhat-linux Configured with: ../configure --prefix=/usr ....... Thread model: posix gcc version 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-46)
If GCC is not installed, then you will have to install it yourself using the detailed instructions available at https://gcc.gnu.org/install/
This tutorial has been written based on Linux and all the given examples have been compiled on the Cent OS flavor of the Linux system.
Installation on Mac OS
If you use Mac OS X, the easiest way to obtain GCC is to download the Xcode development environment from Apple's web site and follow the simple installation instructions. Once you have Xcode setup, you will be able to use GNU compiler for C/C++.
Xcode is currently available at developer.apple.com/technologies/tools/.
Installation on Windows
To install GCC on Windows, you need to install MinGW. To install MinGW, go to the MinGW homepage, www.mingw.org, and follow the link to the MinGW download page. Download the latest version of the MinGW installation program, which should be named MinGW-<version>.exe.
While installing Min GW, at a minimum, you must install gcc-core, gcc-g++, binutils, and the MinGW runtime, but you may wish to install more.
Add the bin subdirectory of your MinGW installation to your PATH environment variable, so that you can specify these tools on the command line by their simple names.
After the installation is complete, you will be able to run gcc, g++, ar, ranlib, dlltool, and several other GNU tools from the Windows command line.
Before we study the basic building blocks of the C programming language, let us look at a bare minimum C program structure so that we can take it as a reference in the upcoming chapters.
Hello World Example
A C program basically consists of the following parts −
- Preprocessor Commands
- Functions
- Variables
- Statements & Expressions
- Comments
Let us look at a simple code that would print the words "Hello World" −
#include <stdio.h> int main() { /* my first program in C */ printf("Hello, World! \n"); return 0; }
Let us take a look at the various parts of the above program −
The first line of the program #include <stdio.h> is a preprocessor command, which tells a C compiler to include stdio.h file before going to actual compilation.
The next line int main() is the main function where the program execution begins.
The next line /*...*/ will be ignored by the compiler and it has been put to add additional comments in the program. So such lines are called comments in the program.
The next line printf(...) is another function available in C which causes the message "Hello, World!" to be displayed on the screen.
The next line return 0; terminates the main() function and returns the value 0.
Compile and Execute C Program
Let us see how to save the source code in a file, and how to compile and run it. Following are the simple steps −
Open a text editor and add the above-mentioned code.
Save the file as hello.c
Open a command prompt and go to the directory where you have saved the file.
Type gcc hello.c and press enter to compile your code.
If there are no errors in your code, the command prompt will take you to the next line and would generate a.out executable file.
Now, type a.out to execute your program.
You will see the output "Hello World" printed on the screen.
$ gcc hello.c $ ./a.out Hello, World!
Make sure the gcc compiler is in your path and that you are running it in the directory containing the source file hello.c.
You have seen the basic structure of a C program, so it will be easy to understand other basic building blocks of the C programming language.
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