Book Image

Learn C Programming - Second Edition

By : Jeff Szuhay
Book Image

Learn C Programming - Second Edition

By: Jeff Szuhay

Overview of this book

The foundation for many modern programming languages such as C++, C#, JavaScript, and Go, C is widely used as a system programming language as well as for embedded systems and high-performance computing. With this book, you'll be able to get up to speed with C in no time. The book takes you through basic programming concepts and shows you how to implement them in the C programming language. Throughout the book, you’ll create and run programs that demonstrate essential C concepts, such as program structure with functions, control structures such as loops and conditional statements, and complex data structures. As you make progress, you’ll get to grips with in-code documentation, testing, and validation methods. This new edition expands upon the use of enumerations, arrays, and additional C features, and provides two working programs based on the code used in the book. What's more, this book uses the method of intentional failure, where you'll develop a working program and then purposely break it to see what happens, thereby learning how to recognize possible mistakes when they happen. By the end of this C programming book, you’ll have developed basic programming skills in C that can be easily applied to other programming languages and have gained a solid foundation for you to build on as a programmer.
Table of Contents (38 chapters)
1
Part 1: C Fundamentals
10
Part 2: Complex Data Types
19
Part 3: Memory Manipulation
22
Part 4: Input and Output
28
Part 5: Building Blocks for Larger Programs

Using enumerated item values as literal integer constants

There is one other form of enumerated types. It is when we want to give an identifier to a literal constant value and we want to avoid the use of #define. Early versions of C relied upon the preprocessor heavily – later versions, much less so. The pros and cons of using the preprocessor will be discussed in Chapter 24, Working with Multi-File Programs.

Instead of using #define, we can declare an anonymous enumerated type that contains enumerated items that act identically to literal constants, as follows:

enum {
  inchesPerFoot = 12,
  FeetPerYard   = 3,
  feetPerMile   = 5280,
  yardsPerMile  = 1760,
  ...
}

Note that there is no name associated with the enum type; this is what makes it anonymous. Each of these enumerated values can be used wherever we need that value; we simply use its name. This will...