Keywords and special characters in C language

In the C language, we have some special words with their set of special characters; these words are called keywords.

Keywords are reserved in C; they cannot be used for other purposes as if we cannot declare a keyword a variable or we cannot use it as a constant also

There are 32 reserved keywords in the C language. Let us have a look at some.

Special characters in C

In the C programming language, special characters have their special meaning, and they cannot be used for other purposes.

Some of the special characters used in c are

1. #
2. *
3. =
4. ;
5. ,
6. {}
7. []
8. ()

• Preprocessor (#):

The preprocessor is used to transform the program before the compilation. Execution of the preprocessor takes place before compilation. The other name for preprocessor is “macro processor.”

• The assignment operator

This operator is used to assign any value. The assignment operator is used for many purposes in the c program. We can assign the value to the variable declared.

E.g. a=10;

Here we are assigning the value 10 to the variable a.

• Asterisk (*)

This special character creates a pointer variable.

Suppose we have variable a, then we can create the pointer to the variable as *a.

• Semicolon (;)

The semicolon is used to terminate the line. It is also called statement terminated in the c program; each line is ended with a semicolon.

In case we miss adding a semicolon at the end of each line in the program, then an error will be shown.

• Colon (:)

This special symbol is used for the initialization of the list.

• The comma (,)

If there is more than one statement, then a comma is used to separate the statements, for example, separating parameters in function calls.

• Braces{}

The opening braces to carry out some executions after finishing programming code-closing braces are used to close the code blocks and open the code blocks.

• Parentheses()

These parentheses are used in function parameters and in making function calls.

• Brackets[]

These brackets are used for array elements like

Single and multidimensional subscripts.

The table given below indicates the special characters and their respective meaning.