Concluding Thoughts

Looking back

Often in first introductions to a programming language what’s happening behind the scenes, as a program is compiled and executed, is abstracted out and glossed over. That’s impossible to do with the teaching of C language. With C, the insights we get from learning to program in C tend to stay with us for a life time.

At the outset of this course, we were pulled into a world where different data types take different amounts of memory, and as we progressed we got to see how variables are allocated in different parts of the memory, and how they are created and destroyed. We saw how pointers give us immense power over not just the data we store, but also how we can use pointers to functions to make functions calls.

We saw how more complex expressions are built from simpler ones. We learned about more complex data types like enumerations, structs and arrays. We also saw how under the hood arrays are implemented as pointers. We learned to read and write to the I/O stream as well as to ASCII and binary files.

We learned how to define functions, and how to call them by value and by reference. We even saw briefly how to write simple recursive code. We came across constructs (like if-else, switch, and the ternary operator) that let us alter the flow of execution of a program, and the looping constructs that let us iterate over a block of code.