Enjoy!
Steinowitz and Volatility

C: The beginning
----------------


Well, C is a relatively simple language, in that it does not have too many
language constructs. That's because the language is relatively low-level,
it's quite close to the machine, so to say. And the machine is a thing of
anarchy and chaos. C was developed to get some structure in this, without
sacrificing too much performance, and size.

We have:

- Data declarations
- Functions
- Operators
- Flow control statements
- Type definitions

That is what you have to work with. In short, code consists of functions,
containing (flow control) statements, with operations on data of specific
types.
That may seem a bit to grasp at this point, but we'll take it one step at a
time.

Data
----

Ofcourse we need data... like text or numbers. On data, we can perform
operations, like adding, subtracting, multiplying and such.
So first, let's see how we can give our programs some data.

We have 2 kinds of data: initialized data, and uninitialized data. They are
declared in much the same way, except that initialized data gets a value,
and uninitialized data does not.

First you give the type of your data variable, then you give the name:

char myChar;

This is an unintialized data variable. Initialized data works by assigning an
initial value to the variable:

char myChar = 'a';

Well, char is just 1 primitive data type of C. I will give you the complete
list and their sizes in memory here:

- char          1 byte integer, also used for characters.
- short         2 bytes integer.
- int           2 or 4 bytes integer, depending on the system architecture.
- long          4 bytes integer.
- float         4 bytes floating point number.
- double        8 bytes floating point number.
- (pointers)    depending on the system architecture.

As you see, some data types are dependant on the system. So to make things
easier, I will choose the popular x86 system in 32 bit mode from now on.
Note that other systems may vary.

On the x86 system, ints are 4 bytes, and so are pointers. Pointers are a
special group of data types, which I will cover later.

These data types are seen as signed numbers by default. You can control this
behavior with the signed and unsigned directives:

signed int;
unsigned int;

It is also legal to define multiple variables of the same type on one line,
even intermixing initialized and uninitialized data.
It works by simply separating all variables by comma's, like this:

unsigned int myVar1, myVar2, myVar3 = 50, myVar4;

... More to come next issue

X-Calibre

Credits and thanks for this issue go to: amante4, Authors of BIEW, Corn, Crackenstein, douby, KarlitoxZ, Konstantin, sepulcrum, X-Calibre

Volatility's personal greetings fly out to: ACiD_BuRN, alpine, Carpathia, Corn, douby, JosephCo, knotty, Latigo, LaZaRuS, Lord Soth, Lucifer48, Neural, _pain, +Sandman, S^witz, Tornado, WarezPup, X-Calibre, Yoshi, and everyone I forgot (probably MANY)

Steinowitz' personal greetings fly out to: Knotty Dread, douby, Rhythm, Volatility, Dracon, ~S~, BaneOldMan, Malattia, NeuRaL_NoiSe, _duelist, korretje, MisterE, Bill Goats, PeeWee, sepulcrum, Kwazy Webbit, night, Tornado, ACiD_BuRN and everyone else in #dread, #cracking4newbies and #immortaldescendants