1.2. Basic Syntax#
You have seen the basic structure of a C program, so it will be easy to understand other basic building blocks of the C programming language.
1.2.1. Tokens in C#
A C program consists of various tokens and a token is either a keyword, an identifier, a constant, a string literal, or a symbol. For example, the following C statement consists of five tokens
printf("Hello, World!\n");
The individual tokens are
printf
(
"Hello, World! \n"
)
;
1.2.2. Semicolons#
In a C program, the semicolon is a statement terminator. That is, each individual statement must be ended with a semicolon. It indicates the end of one logical entity.
Given below are two different statements
printf("Hello, World!\n");
return 0;
1.2.4. Identifiers#
A C identifier is a name used to identify a variable, function, or any other user-defined item. An identifier starts with a letter A to Z, a to z, or an underscore _ followed by zero or more letters, underscores, and digits (0 to 9).
C does not allow punctuation characters such as @, $, and % within identifiers. C is a case-sensitive programming language. Thus, Manpower and manpower are two different identifiers in C. Here are some examples of acceptable identifiers,
mohd zara abc move_name a_123
myname50 _temp j a23b9 retVal
1.2.5. Keywords#
The following list shows the reserved words in C. These reserved words may not be used as constants or variables or any other identifier names.
auto else long switch
break enum register typedef
case extern return union
char float short unsigned
const for signed void
continue goto sizeof volatile
default if static while
do int struct double
1.2.6. Whitespace in C#
A line containing only whitespace, possibly with a comment, is known as a blank line, and a C compiler totally ignores it.
Whitespace is the term used in C to describe blanks, tabs, newline characters and comments. Whitespace separates one part of a statement from another and enables the compiler to identify where one element in a statement, such as int, ends and the next element begins. Therefore, in the following statement,
int age;
there must be at least one whitespace character (usually a space) between int and age for the compiler to be able to distinguish them. On the other hand, in the following statement,
fruit = apples + oranges; // get the total fruit
no whitespace characters are necessary between fruit and =, or between = and apples, although you are free to include some if you wish to increase readability.
1.2.3. Comments#
Comments are like helping text in your C program and they are ignored by the compiler. They start with
/*and terminate with the characters*/as shown belowYou cannot have comments within comments and they do not occur within a string or character literals.