What is imaginary in C?
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In C, imaginary is a macro that enables the programmer to write pure imaginary numbers.
The
imaginarymacro expands to the_Imaginarymacro.
To use the imaginary macro, the program needs to include the header file <complex.h> as shown below:
#include <complex.h>
Syntax
You can define a variable x for pure imaginary numbers through the imaginary macro in three ways:
float imaginary x
double imaginary x
long double imaginary x
Examples
The following code demonstrates how to declare, define, and print an imaginary number.
After declaring an imaginary number x, it is added to a real number to form a complex number. The program then uses the creal() function to extract the real number, followed by the cimag() function to extract the imaginary number in order to print the complex number.
#include <stdio.h>#include <complex.h>int main(){// imaginarydouble complex x = 4.0 * I;// realdouble real = 9.0;// complex numberdouble complex num = real + x;// print complex numberprintf("z = %.1f%+.1fi\n", creal(num), cimag(num));}
Note: According to the official documentation, “A compiler that defines
__STDC_IEC_559_COMPLEX__is not required to support imaginary numbers.” We can use thecomplexmacro instead of theimaginarymacro in line 7 and that will get the job done.
