The Basics And Pitfalls Of Pointers In C

Table Of Content

• The C Programming Language
• Hackaday Podcast Episode 268: RF Burns, Wireless Charging Sucks, And Barnacles Grow On Flaperons
• Relations to other languages
• Some other languages are themselves written in C

Another common set of C library functions are those used by applications specifically targeted for Unix and Unix-like systems, especially functions which provide an interface to the kernel. These functions are detailed in various standards such as POSIX and the Single UNIX Specification. The C-family programming languages share significant features of the C programming language. The family also includes predecessors that influenced C's design such as BCPL. Three of the header files (complex.h, stdatomic.h, and threads.h) are conditional features that implementations are not required to support.

The C Programming Language

Furthermore, in most expression contexts (a notable exception is as operand of sizeof), an expression of array type is automatically converted to a pointer to the array's first element. This implies that an array is never copied as a whole when named as an argument to a function, but rather only the address of its first element is passed. Therefore, although function calls in C use pass-by-value semantics, arrays are in effect passed by reference. Additional multi-byte encoded characters may be used in string literals, but they are not entirely portable. The latest C standard (C11) allows multi-national Unicode characters to be embedded portably within C source text by using \uXXXX or \UXXXXXXXX encoding (where the X denotes a hexadecimal character), although this feature is not yet widely implemented.

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Unions in C are related to structures and are defined as objects that may hold (at different times) objects of different types and sizes. Unlike structures, the components of a union all refer to the same location in memory. In this way, a union can be used at various times to hold different types of objects, without the need to create a separate object for each new type. In general, the widths and representation scheme implemented for any given platform are chosen based on the machine architecture, with some consideration given to the ease of importing source code developed for other platforms. The width of the int type varies especially widely among C implementations; it often corresponds to the most "natural" word size for the specific platform. The standard header limits.h defines macros for the minimum and maximum representable values of the standard integer types as implemented on any specific platform.

Relations to other languages

C89 is supported by current C compilers, and most modern C code is based on it. Any program written only in Standard C and without any hardware-dependent assumptions will run correctly on any platform with a conforming C implementation, within its resource limits. Void pointers are commonly found in dynamic memory allocation functions, for example as return type for malloc() and as parameter type for free(), and any other generic memory accessing functions such as memcpy() or fwrite(). Keep in mind though, since it removes details of the data itself, dereferencing a void pointer will result in a compiler error, unless we first cast to an explicit pointer type.

Arrays

The POSIX specification includes header files for, among other uses, multi-threading, networking, and regular expressions. These are often implemented alongside the C standard library functionality, with varying degrees of closeness. For example, glibc implements functions such as fork within libc.so, but before NPTL was merged into glibc it constituted a separate library with its own linker flag argument. Often, this POSIX-specified functionality will be regarded as part of the library; the basic C library may be identified as the ANSI or ISO C library.

C syntax

The first line of the program contains a preprocessing directive, indicated by #include. This causes the compiler to replace that line with the entire text of the stdio.h standard header, which contains declarations for standard input and output functions such as printf and scanf. The angle brackets surrounding stdio.h indicate that stdio.h can be located using a search strategy that prefers headers provided with the compiler to other headers having the same name, as opposed to double quotes which typically include local or project-specific header files. POSIX, as well as SUS, specify a number of routines that should be available over and above those in the basic C standard library.

Such constants are generally safer to use than macros, since they reside within a specific identifier namespace. The representation of some types may include unused "padding" bits, which occupy storage but are not included in the width. The following table provides a complete list of the standard integer types and their minimum allowed widths (including any sign bit). The C11 standard adds numerous new features to C and the library, including type generic macros, anonymous structures, improved Unicode support, atomic operations, multi-threading, and bounds-checked functions. It also makes some portions of the existing C99 library optional, and improves compatibility with C++.

Control structures

Unless otherwise specified, static objects contain zero or null pointer values upon program startup. If the program attempts to access an uninitialized value, the results are undefined. Many modern compilers try to detect and warn about this problem, but both false positives and false negatives can occur.

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C does not have a special provision for declaring multi-dimensional arrays, but rather relies on recursion within the type system to declare arrays of arrays, which effectively accomplishes the same thing. The index values of the resulting "multi-dimensional array" can be thought of as increasing in row-major order. Multi-dimensional arrays are commonly used in numerical algorithms (mainly from applied linear algebra) to store matrices. However, in early versions of C the bounds of the array must be known fixed values or else explicitly passed to any subroutine that requires them, and dynamically sized arrays of arrays cannot be accessed using double indexing.

A consequence of C's wide availability and efficiency is that compilers, libraries and interpreters of other programming languages are often implemented in C.[45] For example, the reference implementations of Python,[46] Perl,[47] Ruby,[48] and PHP[49] are written in C. These three approaches are appropriate in different situations and have various trade-offs. For example, static memory allocation has little allocation overhead, automatic allocation may involve slightly more overhead, and dynamic memory allocation can potentially have a great deal of overhead for both allocation and deallocation.

After preprocessing, at the highest level a C program consists of a sequence of declarations at file scope. These may be partitioned into several separate source files, which may be compiled separately; the resulting object modules are then linked along with implementation-provided run-time support modules to produce an executable image. Individual character constants are single-quoted, e.g. 'A', and have type int (in C++, char). The difference is that "A" represents a null-terminated array of two characters, 'A' and '\0', whereas 'A' directly represents the character value (65 if ASCII is used). The same backslash-escapes are supported as for strings, except that (of course) " can validly be used as a character without being escaped, whereas ' must now be escaped.

Different from many other languages, control-flow will fall through to the next case unless terminated by a break. Dereferencing a null pointer value is undefined, often resulting in a segmentation fault. Null pointer values are useful for indicating special cases such as no "next" pointer in the final node of a linked list, or as an error indication from functions returning pointers. In appropriate contexts in source code, such as for assigning to a pointer variable, a null pointer constant can be written as 0, with or without explicit casting to a pointer type, as the NULL macro defined by several standard headers or, since C23 with the constant nullptr.