somasis/learn-c

Learning C.

Notes on C

Variables and Types

There’s a level of style when it comes to the placement of *, in declarations. However, for the sake of simplicity, just use char *name1, *name2 for consistency’s sake.

In a declaration, an asterisk declares a pointer, and then later when you’re using that declared variable, you’d use *name to dereference the pointer and attain the actual value.

char

A single character. C doesn’t actually have a string type. Instead, to create a string, you would use char *name; a char *name creates a series of characters in memory.

• When using with with something like fprintf(), you actually just pass the non-dereferenced variable; fprintf(stderr, "%s\n", usage) will work fine, as fprintf() expects a char*.

Pitfalls

const

const is basically just syntactic sugar. It’ll make the compiler emit warnings but it doesn’t really mean anything, semantically.