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Modern C, Third Edition
book

Modern C, Third Edition

by Jens Gustedt
September 2025
Intermediate to advanced
552 pages
14h 5m
English
Manning Publications
Audiobook available
Content preview from Modern C, Third Edition

2 The principal structure of a program

This chapter covers

  • C grammar
  • Declaring identifiers
  • Defining objects
  • Instructing the compiler with statements

Compared to our little examples in the previous section, real programs will be more complicated and contain additional constructs, but their structure will be very similar. Listing 1.1 already has most of the structural elements of a C program.

There are two categories of aspects to consider in a C program: syntactical aspects (how do we specify the program so the compiler understands it?) and semantic aspects (what do we specify so the program does what we want it to do?). In the following subsections, we will introduce the syntactical aspects (grammar) and three different semantic aspects: ...

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