Constants, Variables and Keywords

The alphabets, numbers and special symbols when properly combined form constants, variables and keywords. Let us see what are ‘constants’ and ‘variables’ in C. A constant is an entity that doesn’t change whereas a variable is an entity that may change.
In any program we typically do lots of calculations. The results of these calculations are stored in computers memory. Like human memory the computer memory also consists of millions of cells. The calculated values are stored in these memory cells. To make the retrieval and usage of these values easy these memory cells (also called memory locations) are given names. Since the value stored in each location may change the names given to these locations are called variable names. Consider the following example.
Here 3 is stored in a memory location and a name x is given to it. Then we are assigning a new value 5 to the same memory location x. This would overwrite the earlier value 3, since a memory location can hold only one value at a time. This is shown in Figure 1.3.

Types of C constants

C constants can be divided into two major categories:

(a)Primary Constants

(b)Secondary Constants

At this stage we would restrict our discussion to only Primary Constants, namely, Integer, Real and Character constants. Let us see the details of each of these constants. For constructing these different types of constants certain rules have been laid down.