1.6. Summary

This chapter has introduced many of the basics of the language although informally. Functions, in particular, form the basic building block for C. Chapter 4 provides a full description of these fundamental objects, but you should by now understand enough about them to follow their informal use in the intervening material.

Although the idea of library functions has been introduced, it has not been possible to illustrate the extent of their importance to the C application programmer. The Standard Library, described in Chapter 9, is extremely important, both in the way that it helps to improve the portability of programs intended for general use and also in the aid to productivity that these useful functions can provide.

The use of variables, expressions and arithmetic are soon to be described in great detail. As this chapter has shown, at a simple level, C differs little from most other modern programming languages.

Only the use of structured data types still remains to be introduced, although arrays have had a very brief airing.