Programming For Problem Solving

L 3 C 3

Teachers Continuous Evaluation: 40 marks. Term-End Semester Examination: 60 marks.

Course outcomes

• Ability to develop simple algorithms for arithmetic and logical problems and implement them in ‘C’.
• Ability to implement conditional branching, iteration and recursion and functions in ‘C’
• Ability to use arrays, pointers, union and structures to develop algorithms and programs in ‘C’.
• Ability to decompose a problem into functions and synthesize a complete program using divide and conquer approach in ‘C’.

Unit I

Structure of a C program, Basic data types (int, char, float, double, bool, fixed-width integers), Declarations and initializations, Constants using const and #define, Operators and expressions (arithmetic, relational, logical, bitwise, assignment, conditional, increment/decrement), Type conversions (implicit, explicit casting), Input/output (printf, scanf, format specifiers), Compound statements (blocks), Conditional statements (if, if-else, else-if, switch), Loops (while, do-while, for, infinite loops, early exit), break, continue, goto, return, Algorithm development including flowcharts, pseudocode representation, Tracing and dry run, structured programming. C89, C99, C11 and C23 extensions and usage

Unit II

Function declaration, definition, and invocation, Argument passing (by value, recursion), Inline functions and macro functions, Storage classes (auto, static, extern, register, thread_local), Scope and lifetime of variables, Header files and modular program design, One-and two-dimensional arrays (declaration, access, memory layout), Bubble sort, selection sort, insertion sort, linear and binary search, String input/output (gets, puts, fgets, fputs), Standard string manipulation (strlen, strcpy, strcat, strcmp, etc.), Arrays of strings, Command-line arguments. Root finding of a positive floating point number.

Unit III

Structures (struct definition, nested structures, array of structures, pointer to structures), Unions (union, use-cases, memory layout), Enumerated types (enum, typedef enum), Bit fields, Memory layout and alignment, Pointers (declaration, dereferencing, pointer arithmetic, arrays vs pointers, pointer to pointer), Dynamic memory allocation (malloc, calloc, realloc, free), Memory leak prevention, NULL and null pointer checks, Compound literals, Representation and Arithmetic on polynomials with floating point coefficients. Matrices and arithmetic operations on them (addition, subtraction and multiplication). File I/O (opening, closing, reading, writing text and binary files, fopen, fclose, fprintf, fscanf, fread, fwrite, fgets, fputs), Error handling using errno, Command-line parameters

Unit IV

Abstract Data Types (ADTs), Singly and doubly linked lists , Stack (array and linked list implementation), Infix-to-postfix conversion, Parenthesis balancing, Queue (linear, circular, priority) (array and linked list implementation), Traversal, insertion, deletion in lists, Binary tree basics (creation, inorder, preorder, postorder traversal), Function pointers, Pointers to arrays and functions, Idea of Generic code using macros, _Generic for type-generic programming, Assertions and diagnostics (assert, _Static_assert), Safer macros and expressions, Forward declaration, Program segmentation, Header hygiene, recursion.

Textbooks

• The C programming language, B W Kernighan and D M Ritchie, Pearson Education, 1988.
• Modern C, Jens Gustedt, O’Reilly, 2020
• ISO/IEC 9899-XXXX, The ISO Standard for the C language.

References

• Modern C, Zoran Pavlovic, Manning Publications, 2020
• 21st Century C, Ben Klemens, O’Reilly Media, 2014
• C: How to Program, Paul Deitel and Harvey Deitel, 8th Edition, Pearson, 2016
• Engineering Problem Solving With C, Delores M. Etter, Pearson, 2013.
• Problem Solving and Program Design in C, Jeri R. Hanly and Elliot B. Koffman, Pearson, 2016.
• C Programming: A Modern Approach, K. N. King, W. W. Norton, 2008
• MIT 6.087 Course Notes, Practical C Programming