Book Image

Learn C Programming

By : Jeff Szuhay
Book Image

Learn C Programming

By: Jeff Szuhay

Overview of this book

C is a powerful general-purpose programming language that is excellent for beginners to learn. This book will introduce you to computer programming and software development using C. If you're an experienced developer, this book will help you to become familiar with the C programming language. This C programming book takes you through basic programming concepts and shows you how to implement them in C. Throughout the book, you'll create and run programs that make use of one or more C concepts, such as program structure with functions, data types, and conditional statements. You'll also see how to use looping and iteration, arrays, pointers, and strings. As you make progress, you'll cover code documentation, testing and validation methods, basic input/output, and how to write complete programs in C. By the end of the book, you'll have developed basic programming skills in C, that you can apply to other programming languages and will develop a solid foundation for you to advance as a programmer.
Table of Contents (33 chapters)
1
Section 1: C Fundamentals
10
Section 2: Complex Data Types
19
Section 3: Memory Manipulation
22
Section 4: Input and Output
28
Section 5: Building Blocks for Larger Programs

Understanding implicit type conversion and values

So, what happens when expressions are performed with operands of different types, for example, the multiplication of an intwith a float, or the subtraction of a double from a short?

To answer that, let's revisit our sizes_ranges2.c program from Chapter 3, Working with Basic Data Types. There, we saw how different data types took different numbers of bytes; some are 1 byte, some are 2 bytes, some are 4 bytes, and most values are 8 bytes.

When C encounters an expression of mixed types, it first performs an implicit conversion of the smallest data type (in bytes) to match the number of bytes in the largest data type size (in bytes). The conversion occurs such that the value with the narrow range would be converted into the other with a wider range of values.

Consider the following calculation:

int    feet  = 11;
double yards = 0.0;
yards = feet / 3;

In this calculation, both the feetvariable...