Class 05: An Introduction to C

Back to Linux, Continued. On to Getting Started with Emacs and Compiling C Programs.

This outline is also available in PDF.

Held: Monday, 31 January 2011

Summary: We begin to explore the C progamming language.

Related Pages:

EBoard.
Lab: Compiling C.
Reading: K&R 1.

Notes:

Assignment 2 is ready. Sorry for the delay in getting it out.
Reading for tonight: Wikipedia on Emacs.
It was a crazy weekend, so I'm behind in getting grading done. I'll get it to you as soon as I can.
EC for Thursday's Summer Opportunities talk.

Overview:

About the C Programming Language.
Some C Basics.
Q & A.
Lab: Compiling C.

About the C Programming Language

A moderately old language (early 1970's)
- Newer than Fortran, Cobol, Algol
- About the same age as Pascal
- Older than Java, Python
Imperative
- Assignment is a key operation
- Sequencing of operations is a key concept
Comparatively low-level
- You get to play with the underlying machine
- You have to play with the underlying machine
Small
Coherent: Developed by one person (Dennis Ritchie)
Closely linked to Unix. (The language in which Unix was developed.)
A popular language and an even more popular syntax.

The Basics of C

There are six basic things you need to know to write a program in a language.
What are they?
And what did you learn about how to do them in C?

Questions and Answers

What are your primary questions from the reading?

Lab

Begin the lab.

Back to Linux, Continued. On to Getting Started with Emacs and Compiling C Programs.

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Disclaimer: I usually create these pages on the fly, which means that I rarely proofread them and they may contain bad grammar and incorrect details. It also means that I tend to update them regularly (see the history for more details). Feel free to contact me with any suggestions for changes.

This document was generated by Siteweaver on Tue May 10 10:34:26 2011.
The source to the document was last modified on Wed Jan 5 12:52:13 2011.
This document may be found at http://www.cs.grinnell.edu/~rebelsky/Courses/CSC161/2011S/Outlines/outline.05.html.

Samuel A. Rebelsky, rebelsky@grinnell.edu