How to teach C to a violinist

I know lots of computer geeks who learn music but I just know one musician who would like to learn how to make programs just to “have fun” with it (yeah, crazy).

This entry (and I hope that some more in future) is to try to explain C in a very easy way, so if you are studying computer science, just read this in case you want to laugh a little .

Well, I assume you know how to use a text editor and the compiler. So we will just talk about C.

Main function

We won’t explain now what functions are, just imagine they are places to put the code inside and the main function will be the first one that will be executed.

The synthax is the following:

int main ( ) {

/*Code of the program*/

}

Comments

You may like to put comments on your program to explain things to other readers of the code or just to make you not forget why did you do one certain thing on a certain moment. To insert the comments you just have to put the text inside /* and */ as you see in the example above. It won’t affect the program execution.

Variables

Imagine that you want to do a program that makes the addition of 2 numbers. You must store those numbers somewhere. Thats the reason to use variables. I think you can imagine them as a box where you can put numbers, characters and some other things (that you don’t need to worry about for now ).

How to declare them. I will show you with some examples.

int a;

This line declares a variable which can “hold” an integer number, the name of the variable is a. And int is the type of the variable. For now we will just use int variables. You must put this declaration at the beggining of the main function. And, at the end of this statement you must type ;

Which value is stored on that variable? We didn’t put any values so you can’t know which value is stored there.

Declare a variable with a value:

int b=4;

This would declare a int variable called b which stores the value 4.

Can I change the value of a variable after declaring it? Yes. You have to put the variable name, then the symbol “=” and then the value (or operations which results in that value)s.

a=34;

b=a+2;

Can you give me an example of all that? My mind is going crazy!

Yes, I can:

int main ( ) {

int a; /*This declares variable a*/

int b=4; /*This declares variable b with value 4*/

a=3; /*This stores 3 on variable a*/

b=a+2; /*This will change the value of b from 4 to 5*/

}