Aim
The purpose of the course is that the student shall how to write program in the C programming language.

Knowledge and understanding
For a passing grade the student must

• understand how memory is allocated and deallocated in C,

• understand how pointers work and how they are used,

• understand the type system of C, e.g. which type conversions are permitted and portable,

• understand the meaning of undefined behaviour, implementation defined behaviour, and unspecified behaviour and when it is important to should think about them.

Skills and abilities
For a passing grade the student must

• be able to write programs in the language C99,

• be able to use the debugger GDB, and

• be able to use the tool Valgrind for automatic detection of memory related errors.

Judgement and approach
For a passing grade the student must

• be able to select the appropriate memory allocation method depending on the situation.

Contents
The course is web based and is given twice a year. The students solve the compulsory assignments on their own and submit their solutions via e-mail.

An overview of ISO C (C99). Basic C programming: types, program structures, functions. The preprocessor. Pointers. Memory handling: static allocation, stack allocation, heap allocation. The standard library. Portability, differences between ANSI C and C99. Program development tools: gcc, make, gdb, and Valgrind.

Literature
Jonas Skeppstedt and Christian Söderberg: Writing Efficient Safety-Critical C Code
a Thorough Introduction for Java Programmers. ISBN: 978 91 977 940 08