A programmer needs some basic tools for developing a program. These are the must have's while programming. These tools provides facilities such as creating the code files, saving them and whenever needed to manipulate them; with such files we can execute them to get the output for the program written; we can also test the written program or debug it line by line. Following are those important tools used:
1. Editor
2. Compiler
3. Debugger
Let's understand these tools in brief:
Editor:
An Editor is a program which enables the programmer to create the respective code file, and also perform operations such as edit, save, delete etc on the file.
For C programming we can use Turbo C/C++ kit for developing code. Further, some of the IDE's for developing C code are Netbeans, Eclipse, Code::Blocks, CodeLite etc.
The Turbo C++ Editor
Compiler:
A Compiler is a special program used for translating/converting the high-level language ('C','Java' etc) code into machine understandable code which our systems can understand and execute to give the final output for the written code.
The compiler also checks for the syntactical errors in the source code, for instance errors like missing out the ';' from code statement or errors related to the predefined functions or the keywords.
The Compiler showing syntactical error of missing out the ';'
Debugger:
A Debugger is a tool which helps in detecting the bugs/errors in the source code line by line. With this functionality the code can be tested such that which line has the issue, what is the issue with variable values etc. Further, debugging gives the idea of what the code is doing and why it is not doing what it is expected to do.
This would help the programmer to be more precise and accurate towards the functionality of the program that he/she is developing so that the output so generated after execution would be close enough to the expectation.
Many of the compilers do provide the debuggers in-built like the Turbo C/C++.
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