C Is for Children: My First Thirty-Two Keywords

Copyright © 2014 D. Michael Parrish

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-1359-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-1360-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013921272

iUniverse rev. date:  01/17/2014

The epigraph is taken from the Holy Bible (Textus Receptus and King James Version).

Cover art background image copyright Moya Phototography, Inc. Used with permission.

CONTENTS

Note To Parents And Guardians

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part 0: Much Ado About Nothing

Chapter 0: Nothing

Chapter 1: Anything, Anywhere, And Nowhere

Chapter 2: Something

Chapter 3: Statement

Chapter 4: Return Of Nothing, Definition Of Nothing

Part 1: Your First Program

Chapter 0: The main Idea

Chapter 1: Comment

Part 2: The Three R’s

Chapter 0: Show Me

Chapter 1: Yes, We Scan

Part 3: Branching Out

Chapter 0: 49612.png If You Like To Waltz With Potatoes 49614.png

Chapter 1: If You’d Rather Not Waltz With Potatoes

Chapter 2: After while, Crocodile

Chapter 3: See You Later, Alligator

Chapter 4: Just in case

Chapter 5: Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing.

Chapter 6: for

Chapter 7 : To Be continue’d

Part 4: Assorted Objects

Chapter 0: Halflings

Chapter 1: To 2¹⁶ . . . And Beyond!

Chapter 2: Building Structures

Chapter 3: Return Of The Fry Guy

Chapter 4: Def Type

Part 5: Inside, Outside, Upside Down

Chapter 0: extern (Outside)

Chapter 1: static Klingons Inside!

Part 6: Auto Bots, Move Out!

Part 7: sizeof

Part 8: Fast, Faster, register

Part 9: Volatile

Conclusion

About The Author

Appendi: Installing and Using MinGW

Glossary

Glossary Of Keywords

Resources

References

LIST OF TABLES

Table 0: The Integral Types

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 0: Nothing

Figure 1: Hands Pointin

Figure 2: What’s in a Name

Figure 3: The Four Scopes

LIST OF PROGRAMS

Diddly Squat

Hello Nurse

Scanner

Small Potatoes

More Potatoes

Curly Fries

Fry Menu

Case of Fries

Skip The Fries

Count

Chart

Chart Two

Halflings

Pokemon

Return of the Fry Guy

Def Pokemon

Scopes Trial

Daddies

Pappas

Shoot

Ones

Supersize Me

Counter

for Denwood, Lottie, and Edward

Εν αρχή ην ο λόγος

In the beginning was the Word

NOTE TO PARENTS AND GUARDIANS

I’ve picked up a few programming languages over the years: I use them in my work as an engineer as well as in my play time. Last summer my wife asked me to teach our kids how to program computers. I did not find a children’s book on C, so I thought I would write one and publish it so that you and your children could benefit from the effort I’ve already put in.

Why should kids learn to program computers? Computer programming is exercise for the mind. Computer programming is a valuable, if not essential skill for many professions. If you live in the United States, it can be more important than fluency in a human language other than English. I have used the French I learned in high school very little, and don’t know Spanish, even though I have lived in Florida and northern Virginia for decades, where Spanish is fairly common. Much of the work I do as an engineer could not be done, or could not be done very quickly, without some programming. Just as with human languages, it is never too early to begin learning computer languages. I began at about age seven, just as Commodore was getting low-cost personal computers into our living rooms.

I think C is a good first computer language. Many other computer languages are based on C, and many languages not based on C include concepts inherent to C. Also, the C89 standard has only 32 keywords—convenient for a brief introductory text such as the one you are reading now.

Although this is a book for children (grade 3 or so), I hope that you will assist your child with the new words that are printed in emphasized text, and which are all defined herein. I hope you will also assist your child reader with the exercises by doing some typing and / or copying and pasting from the website, tiny.cc/cisforchildren.

This book begins introducing C with nothing (almost literally). If your child reads English at about the 3rd grade level, he or she should be able to read this book, and should expect to see about three new words per page. It will help if the child reader has a sense of numbers and an arithmetic ability normally acquired by about grade 3 (e.g., counting rules, addition, subtraction, awareness of negative numbers and fractions). The computer will do the math, but it will help to have an idea of what is going on.

Neither you nor your child need to know how to type in order to learn C. Hunt-and-peck works just fine. My high-school computer programming teacher did not know how to type—and neither did I at the time—but what I learned in that class earned me college credit through an Advanced Placement Computer Science exam. As a beginning programmer, you do a lot more work with your brain than with your fingers.

I hope you will have a C compiler installed on your computer so that you can try the example programs along with any of your own. If you are new to C, you might start with gcc or