reading material
the c programming language
c is a high-level programming language debeloped by dennis ritchie and brian kernighan at bell labs in the mid-1970s.although originally designed as a system programming language,c has proved to be a powerful and flexible language that can be used for a variety of applications,from business programs to engineering.c is a particularly poprlar language for personal computer programmers because it is relatively small---it requires less memory than other languages.
as a general-purpose programming language,c has been closely associated with UNIXsystem where it was developed,since both hte system and most of the applications that run on it arewritten in c. the language,however,is not tied to any one operating system or machine;and although it has been called a "system programming language"because it is useful for writing compilers and operating system,it has been used equally well to write major programs in various fields.
c provides the fundamental control-flow constructions required for well-structured programs:statement grouping,decision making(if-else),selecting one of a set of possible cases(switch),looping with the termination test at the top(while,for)or at the bottom(do),and early loop exit(break).
c is a relatively low-level language,meaning that c deals with the same sort of objects that most computers do,namely characters,numbers,and addresses.these may be combined and moved about with the arithmetic and logical operators implemented by real machines.
although c matcher the capability of many computers,it is independent of any particular machine architecture.with a little care it is easy towrite portable proguams,that is,proguams that can be run without change on a variety of hardware.
c,however,like any other language,has its blemisher.some of the operators have the wrong precedence;some parts of the syntax could be better.nonetheless,c has proved to be an extremely effective and expressive language for a wide variety of programming applications.