Sudipta

C series for 1st sem students: File System Manipulation

Posted on November 20, 2018November 20, 2018 SudiptaPosted in Blogs, Technology

Today we are going to discuss FILE SYSTEM operations using the C language. Till now we have worked with the RAM for storing our variables and our data. But the RAM is not persistent. We need to store data permanently. So we store them in permanent memory like hard disks or CDs/DVDs, in files. Different types of data are stored in different type of files, but for our purposes we’ll work with text files in windows system which have an extension of ‘.txt‘.

C series for 1st sem students: Lesser taught constructs, Unions & Enums

Posted on November 11, 2018November 11, 2018 SudiptaPosted in Blogs, Technology

Today we’re going to discuss two topics which are rarely taught in a C programming college course, Unions & Enums. One may justify that by saying they are not absolutely necessary for basic knowledge in programming, or that these topics are rarely asked in interviews. But if you become a professional C developer, you’ll have extensive use of them. These are particularly useful in low level programming, like with embedded systems and robotics.

C series for 1st sem students: Structures in C

Posted on November 7, 2018November 7, 2018 Sudipta1 CommentPosted in Blogs, Technology

One of the main motivations in the development of computers was data processing. One of the earliest punched card machines (tabulation machine) were used to help process data for the 1890 U.S. Census. Thus in programming languages data types were so important, as there are tools and methods to process data according to their type.

C series for 1st sem students: Dynamic Memory Allocation

Posted on October 21, 2018October 21, 2018 Sudipta1 CommentPosted in Blogs, Technology

The process of allocating memory while a program is running is called dynamic memory allocation. In C programming, dynamic memory allocation is achieved with the standard library functions malloc(), calloc(), realloc() and free().

C series for 1st sem students: Void pointers and type casting

Posted on October 14, 2018October 14, 2018 SudiptaPosted in Blogs, Technology

To proceed to the next sections in our discussion on C programming language, we should learn the concept of void pointers, i.e. pointers of no specific type, and type casting, i.e. manually changing the data type of a variable. Type conversion can happen automatically (implicitly) or manually (explicitly). The later is termed as type-casting.

C series for 1st sem students: Pointers as array arguments

Posted on October 11, 2018October 11, 2018 SudiptaPosted in Blogs, Technology

Pointers are used extensively in array operations. The name of the array is actually a reference to the address of the first element, rather than the actual array. Thus the array name is a pointer. So when we pass an array as an argument to a function, we are not actually passing a copy of the array (as we do in case of a variable), but we are passing a copy of the pointer to the first element of that array. This is the “pass by reference” hack that we discussed earlier.

C series for 1st sem students: Pointers in strings and scanf

Posted on October 7, 2018October 7, 2018 SudiptaPosted in Blogs, Technology

To be able to reap the best benefits from pointers, you’ll have to have a deep understanding of them. This blog is going to be very conceptual and we might not be writing real-world value code here, but these program snippets will help you use pointers in a very productive and efficient manner in future. We’ll discuss two use cases of pointers that we generally overlook: strings and the scanf function.

C series for 1st sem students: Pointers in function calls

Posted on September 30, 2018September 30, 2018 SudiptaPosted in Blogs, Technology

C is a procedural language, which means it follows a series of steps/procedures in a systematic order to solve a problem. These procedures are often organized in functions. These functions take in some value(s) as argument(s), operate on them and return an output. But apart from this approach, a function can even change the state of other variables in the global scope, perform input/output operations etc.

C series for 1st sem students: Pointers absolute basics

Posted on September 24, 2018September 24, 2018 SudiptaPosted in Blogs, Technology

Pointer is something that points to the memory location where the value of a variable is stored. Pointers have data-types. This data-type has nothing to do with the value of the pointer itself, because a pointer has a value which is an address, i.e. a number. So the value of a pointer is always an int.

C series for 1st sem students: Arrays in C

Posted on September 17, 2018September 17, 2018 SudiptaPosted in Blogs, Technology

Today we are going to discuss about arrays in C. Arrays is a data structure that can store a fixed-size sequential collection of elements of the same type. In order to understand arrays we must first understand the meaning of the highlighted words of the above definition in terms of programming.