Concluding Thoughts

Looking back

Often, in introductory programming language courses, what happens behind the scenes as a program is compiled and executed is abstracted out and glossed over. That’s impossible to do with the C language. The insights we get from learning to program in C tend to stay with us for a lifetime.

At the outset of this course, we were pulled into a world where different data types take different amounts of memory. As we progressed, we saw how variables are allocated in different parts of 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 function calls.

We saw how more complex expressions are built from simpler ones. We learned about complex data types like enumerations, structs, and arrays. We also saw how arrays are implemented as pointers under the hood. 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 call them by value and reference. We even briefly saw how to write simple recursive code. We encountered constructs (like if-else, switch, and the ternary operator) that let us alter the flow of execution of a program and looping constructs that let us iterate over a block of code.