c- basic syntax

Tokens in C

A C program consists of various tokens and a token is either a keyword, an identifier, a constant, a string literal, or a symbol. For example, the following C statement consists of five tokens:

-->>The individual tokens are:

  consider this example 

printf("Hello, World! \n"); /* print the hellow world*/

-->> 1 Semicolons ;

In C program, the semicolon is a statement terminator. That is, each individual statement must be ended with a semicolon. It indicates the end of one logical entity.
For example, following are two different statements:

printf("Hello, World! \n");
return 0;

-->>2 Comments

 Comments are like helping text in your C program and they are ignored by the compiler. They start with /* and terminates with the characters */ as shown below: 

/* my first program in C */

You cannot have comments within comments and they do not occur within a string or character literals.

-->>3 Identifiers

 A   C   identifier is a name used to identify a variable, function, or any other user-defined item. An identifier starts with a letter A to Z or a to z or an underscore _ followed by zero or more letters, underscores, and digits (0 to 9). 

C does not allow punctuation characters such as @, $, and % within identifiers. C is a case sensitive programming language. Thus, Manpower and manpower are two different identifiers in C. Here are some examples of acceptable identifiers:

mohd zara abc move_name a_123 myname50 _temp j a23b9 retVal

-->>4 Keywords

 The following list shows the reserved words in C. These reserved words may not be used as constant or variable or any other identifier names.

auto	else	long	switch
break	enum	register	typedef
case	extern	return	union
char	float	short	unsigned
const	for	signed	void
continue	goto	sizeof	volatile
default	if	static	while
do	int	struct	_Packed
double

-->>5 Whitespace in C

  A line containing only whitespace, possibly with a comment, is known as a blank line, and a C compiler totally ignores it.

Whitespace is the term used in C to describe blanks, tabs, newline characters and comments. Whitespace separates one part of a statement from another and enables the compiler to identify where one element in a statement, such as int, ends and the next element begins.