Book Image

Extreme C

By : Kamran Amini
5 (1)
Book Image

Extreme C

5 (1)
By: Kamran Amini

Overview of this book

There’s a lot more to C than knowing the language syntax. The industry looks for developers with a rigorous, scientific understanding of the principles and practices. Extreme C will teach you to use C’s advanced low-level power to write effective, efficient systems. This intensive, practical guide will help you become an expert C programmer. Building on your existing C knowledge, you will master preprocessor directives, macros, conditional compilation, pointers, and much more. You will gain new insight into algorithm design, functions, and structures. You will discover how C helps you squeeze maximum performance out of critical, resource-constrained applications. C still plays a critical role in 21st-century programming, remaining the core language for precision engineering, aviations, space research, and more. This book shows how C works with Unix, how to implement OO principles in C, and fully covers multi-processing. In Extreme C, Amini encourages you to think, question, apply, and experiment for yourself. The book is essential for anybody who wants to take their C to the next level.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)

Unicode

One of the greatest features that has been added to the C11 standard is support for Unicode through UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 encodings. C was missing this feature for a long time, and C programmers had to use third-party libraries such as IBM International Components for Unicode (ICU) to fulfill their needs.

Before C11, we only had char and unsigned char types, which were 8-bit variables used to store ASCII and Extended ASCII characters. By creating arrays of these ASCII characters, we could create ASCII strings.

Note:

ASCII standard has 128 characters which can be stored in 7 bits. Extended ASCII is an extension to ASCII which adds another 128 characters to make them together 256 characters. Then, an 8-bit or one-byte variable is enough to store all of them. In the upcoming text, we will only use the term ASCII, and by that we refer to both ASCII standard and Extended ASCII.

Note that support for ASCII characters and strings is fundamental...