If you are learning C programming, you might be wondering how to write a simple program that can calculate the perimeter and area of a rectangle. In this program, I will show you how to do that in just a few lines of code.
First, let's review some basic concepts. A rectangle is a quadrilateral with four right angles and two pairs of parallel sides. The perimeter of a rectangle is the sum of the lengths of all its sides, and the area of a rectangle is the product of the lengths of its base and height.
C Code
To write a C program that can compute the perimeter and area of a rectangle, we need to do the following steps:
- Declare variables to store the height, width, perimeter and area of the rectangle.
- Assign values to the height and width variables. In this example, we will use 7 inches for height and 5 inches for width, but you can change them as you wish.
- Compute the perimeter and area using the formulas: perimeter = 2 * (height + width) and area = height * width.
- Print the results using the printf function.
Here is the code to to compute the perimeter and area of a rectangle with a height of 7 inches and width of 5 inches:
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
// Declare variables
int height = 7;
int width = 5;
int perimeter;
int area;
// Compute perimeter and area
perimeter = 2 * (height + width);
area = height * width;
// Print results
printf("The perimeter of the rectangle is %d inches.\n", perimeter);
printf("The area of the rectangle is %d square inches.\n", area);
return 0;
}
Explanation
Let's go through the code line by line and see how it works.
- The first line '#include <stdio.h>' is a preprocessor directive that tells the compiler to include the standard input/output header file. This file contains the declaration of the printf function that we will use later.
- The second line 'int main()' is the main function of the program. Every C program must have one and only one main function. This is where the execution of the program starts and ends.
- The next four lines are comments that start with '//'. Comments are used to explain or document the code for yourself or others. They are ignored by the compiler and do not affect the output of the program.
- The next four lines declare four variables: height, width, perimeter and area. Variables are names that represent data or values in memory. They have a type (in this case int for integer) and a name (such as height or width). We can assign values to variables using the '=' operator.
- The next two lines compute the perimeter and area using arithmetic operators such as '*' for multiplication and '+' for addition. We can use parentheses to group expressions and control their order of evaluation.
- The last two lines print the results using the printf function. The printf function takes a format string as its first argument and any number of additional arguments that match the placeholders in the format string. For example, '%d' is a placeholder for an integer value. The '\n' character represents a newline that moves the cursor to the next line.
Output
If you run this program, you will get the following output:
The perimeter of the rectangle is 24 inches.
The area of the rectangle is 35 square inches.
As you can see, writing a C program to compute the perimeter and area of a rectangle is not difficult at all. You just need to know how to declare variables, assign values, use arithmetic operators and print statements.
Conclusion
I hope this program was helpful for you. If you want to learn more about C programming, you can check out some of my other posts on this topic. Thank you for reading and happy coding!
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