November 2010
Intermediate to advanced
624 pages
18h 14m
English
Content preview from Real World Instrumentation with PythonBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 4. The C Programming Language
Low-level programming is good for the programmer’s soul.
—John Carmack, cofounder of Id Software
The C programming language was created at Bell Laboratories by Ken Thompson and others between 1969–1973 as part of the early development work on Unix. C has been an integral part of Unix ever since, and Unix is itself written mostly in C (with a few parts written in assembly language where necessary). Linux, Solaris, BSD, and other modern operating systems are also written primarily in C. In this book we will use ANSI C, standardized in the mid-1980s and described in the book The C Programming Language, Second Edition, by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie (Prentice Hall).
This chapter is not intended to be a comprehensive tutorial on the C programming language; it is merely intended to provide enough detail to enable you to effectively apply the C language later, when you need to create extensions for Python. If you happen to be familiar with the original version of C (sometimes called “K&R”), you may notice that things have changed somewhat, but it shouldn’t be difficult to grasp the new features.
Installing C
The gcc compiler is a popular and widely used C compiler. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work with Windows (at least, not directly). Those working in a Linux or Solaris environment with access to gcc are ready to go with nothing else to install, and if gcc is not installed a short session with a package manager can usually solve the problem. If you ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.