Structure of C Program

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Before we look at the basic parts of the programming language C, let’s quickly look at how a very simple C program is put together. This will help us in the next part.

Hello World Example

The following things make up a C program:

Preprocessor Commands
Functions
Variables
Statements and Expressions
Comments

This is a simple code that will print Hello World.

#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
   /* my first program in C */
   printf("Hello, World! \n");
   return 0;
}

Take a look at the different parts of the program above:

Line 1: It tells the C compiler to include the stdio.h file before it starts to compile the code in the first line of the program, which is called #include <stdio.h>.

Line 2: That line, int main() is the program’s main function. It’s where everything begins.

Line 3: The compiler will not use the next line, /*…*/. The code calls these lines comments for that reason.

Line 4: Another function in C, printf() is used to show the message “Hello, World!” on the screen.

Line 5: The function main() ends with the line return 0; which returns the value 0.

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