Page 16 - Programming Microcontrollers in C

Chapter 1

Introduction to C

Programming is a contact sport. Programming theory is interest­
ing, but you must sit at a keyboard and write code to become a
programmer. The aim of this introductory section is to give you a
brief glimpse of C so that you can quickly write simple programs.
Later sections will revisit many of the concepts outlined here and
provide a more in-depth look at what you are doing. For now, let’s
start writing code.

Some Simple Programs

C is a function based language. You will see that C uses far more
functions than other procedural languages. In fact, any C program it­
self is merely a function. This function has a name declared by the
language. In C, parameters are passed to functions as arguments. A
function consists of a name followed by parentheses enclosing argu­
ments, or perhaps an empty pair of parentheses if the function requires
no arguments. If there are several arguments to be passed, the argu­
ments are separated by commas.
The mandatory program function name in C is main. Every C pro­
gram must have a function named main, and this function is the one
executed when the program is run. Examine the following program:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
printf(“Microcontrollers run the world!\n”);
return 0;
}

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