Whitespace in C

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. Therefore, in the following statement:

int age;

there must be at least one whitespace character (usually a space) between int
and age for the compiler to be able to distinguish them. On the other hand, in
the following statement:

fruit = apples + oranges; // get the total fruit

no whitespace characters are necessary between fruit and =, or between = and
apples, although you are free to include some if you wish to increase readability.
Data types in C refer to an extensive system used for declaring variables or
functions of different types. The type of a variable determines how much space
it occupies in storage and how the bit pattern stored is interpreted.

The types in C can be classified as follows:

Types and Description

·    1 Basic Types:

They are arithmetic types and are further classified into: (a) integer
types and (b) floating-point types.

2 Enumerated types:

They are again arithmetic types and they are used to define variables
that can only assign certain discrete integer values throughout the
program.

3 The type void:

The type specifier void indicates that no value is available.

4 Derived types:

They include (a) Pointer types, (b) Array types, (c) Structure types, (d)
Union types, and (e) Function types.

The array types and structure types are referred collectively as the aggregate
types. The type of a function specifies the type of the function's return value. We
will see the basic types in the following section, whereas other types will be
covered in the upcoming chapters.