Mini C program #1

Mini C program #1

Let's punish the computer: the for loop! 

Tutorial presented by: Jérémie F. Bellanger (Jay)
Date of publication: February 21, 2014
Last update: March 9, 2025

Introduction to Mini C Programs

   Hello everyone, and welcome to this new serie of mini tutorials, called mini C programs.

   But why mini C programs, you might ask?

   Well, quite simply because this serie of tutorials will be based on a serie of mini programs, written in C, whose goal will be to help you familiarize yourself with some key functions of C, while having fun and creating programs, if not useful, at least fun!

   At first, we will stick to basic console programs, before moving on to programs that are a little more complex with the Big SDL Tutorial.

   Rather, see these mini-programs as a way to discover or improve your C while having fun (at least I hope so! ).

   Okay, enough talking! Let's get to action! 

Mini C program #1: Let's punish the computer: the for loop!

   Your computer has been naughty?! 

   It crashed in the middle of some super important work (or in the middle of a game )?! 

   And besides, it's not the first time!!!?!!! 

   Well, it's time to get tough!!  And since we're very mean, we're going to make him copy 50,000 lines!!! That'll teach him a lesson, mind you!! 

   Ahah! The goal of our first mini-program will therefore be to make the computer copy a sentence 50,000 times, in console mode.

   But how are we going to do it? 

   Well, simply by using a for loop! 

   As a reminder, a for loop, in C (and in other languages ​​for that matter) needs a counter to work. We will call it i, as is often the case in computing. 

   In the loop declaration, we'll initialize it to 0, and then we'll run our counter up to 50,000 by incrementing i by 1 each time we loop around (i++).

   Inside the loop, we will use a printf() to write in the console, and we will add the line number at the beginning of the sentence, to be able to check that the computer is not cheating us (you never know! ).

   And here we go, for our first mini-program! Not too complicated, right? 

   Now, if you want to practice, it would be good to try to create the program, without looking at the solution below. 

The code

   And here is the solution with the comments:

//We include the C libraries. 
# include <stdio.h> 
# include <stdlib.h>
 
//Program to copy 50,000 lines to the computer: 
int main( ) 
{ 
    //Counter for the loop 
    int i;
 
    //Loop: initialize i to 0, then add 1 to it 
    //each loop until it reaches 50000. 
    for ( i = 0; i <= 50000; i++) 
    { 
        //This function displays the following text on the screen 
        //%d will be replaced by the value i, on display and 
        //will allow to count the lines. 
        //\n allows to skip a line each time. 
        printf("%d times. I must not crash in class. I am a naughty computer.\n", i); 
    }
 
    //We quit when the loop is finished 
    return 0; 
}

And here is the result in picture:

You will be able to download the project files in the Downloads section.