Learn to Program with C_ Learn to Program using the Popular C Programming Language ( PDFDrive )

Chapter 2
C – The Basics
In this chapter, we will explain the following:
• What is an alphabet, a character set, and a token
• What is a syntax rule and a syntax error
• What is a reserved word
• How to create identifiers in C
• What is a symbolic constant
• The C data types—int, float, and double
• How to write int and double expressions
• How to print an integer using a field width
• How to print a floating-point number to a required number
of decimal places
• What happens when int and double values are mixed in the
same expression
• What happens when we assign int to double and double to int
• How to declare a variable to hold a string
• How to assign a string value to a string variable
• Some problems to avoid when using the assignment statement
2.1 Introduction
In this chapter, we discuss some basic concepts you need to know in order to write programs in
the C programming language.
A programming language is similar to speaking languages in many respects. It has an
alphabet (more commonly referred to as a character set) from which everything in the language is
constructed. It has rules for forming words (also called tokens), rules for forming statements, and
rules for forming programs. These are called the syntax rules of the language and must be obeyed
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