Lecture 2 Summary

• C11 is a small programming language (in terms of its number of keywords), although some aspects can be difficult to learn when compared to newer languages.

• C is a compiled programming language. The human-readable source code of a C program needs translating to executable machine code before the program can be executed.

• Unlike Python programs, white-space is insignificant and is not used to define lexical scoping. New lexical blocks are introduced with curly brackets.

• Alphabetic case is significant. Any colour seen in textbooks or possibly (visually) added by your text editor, is insignificant.

• C provides a number of integer data types, of differing system-dependent widths, and two floating-point data types. Data types of exact widths may be explictly specified for architecture-specific programming.

• Floating-point data types are only very rarely used in systems programming.

• C's control-flow statements - conditional statements, bounded and unbounded loops, and nested instances of these, and unconditional control-flow - execute similarly to equivalent statements in other languages, although their syntax may appear unusual.