Understanding how variable assignment works

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

When I started learning C programming a few years ago, my tutor taught me similar to most of the tutors around the world. She said me the very basic things like any int datatype is of 2 bytes memory. If the following is my code,

#include"stdio.h"
#include"conio.h"
void main()
{
    clrscr();
    int i,n;
    n = 0;
    for(i=0;i<3;i++)
        n = n + i;
    printf("%d",n); //obviously it prints 3
    getch();
}

she will explain like what I have written below. Here my teacher starts off her class yet again. . .

Listen students. Here we have two integer values. So let us draw two boxes each of 2 bytes memory.The first box be the memory space of i and the second box be that of n. At n = 0; 0 gets stored into the box n. As the control gets into the loop, 0 gets stored into the box i intially.

0 0

Now the condition is checked. i < 3. Condition gets true. So now the value of n changes from 0 to n+i i.e., 0+0=0. The first iteration then ends after the increment statement. Now i gets incremented to 1. So our picture becomes like this.

1 0

And now i < 3 again. Condtion gets true. n changes from 0 to n + i i.e., 0+1=1. Don't forget the increment my dears. Only then our iteration gets completed. i++ makes our i to 2 now. And the picture will now look like

2 1

She will go on similarly step by step and will complete when both the boxes get 3, 3 values.

So thats it kids. After we get our boxes like this

3 3

the value of n gets printed on the screen.

3

By that time, I was merely like a kid nodding its head when a teacher claims earth as a circular mass. I never asked her any questions. I felt logically she was perfect. But now I am plentiful of queries. If there is a statement like n = n + i;, won't there be a conflict as both the destination space and the operation space is the same n box? Will the operations be done with the help of any default temporary space for calculations? What will happen if I use a recursive code like the following snippet.

int factorial(int n)
{
    if(n < 2)
    {
        return n;
    }
    else
    {
        n = n * factorial(n - 1);
        return n;
    }
}

How could it be possible to use a single n box as my tutor taught? Won't a new n box be created whenever factorial(n - 1) is called? If I am right, how could the computer know which n box value to be returned? Somebody help me please. I am pulling of hairs from ma head!