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is a very popular book in India written by Yashwant Kanetkar. It contains
questions and answers (most of which are objective type) to test the reader¶s C skills. This is one
of the books that almost every engineering student in India reads while preparing for interviews
and selection tests in companies. That is because many companies in India pick up questions
from this book to test candidate¶s skills in their selection process.

Unfortunately, this book contains loads of non-standard, and misinformation about the C
langauge. It deals with codes that are specific to 16bit Turbo C compiler (which is out-dated and
broken). More than 40 % of the book deals with non-standard code. Many of the code snippets in
book invoke undefined behavior, but the author goes on to give his own explanations to those
codes. This instills students with bad and non-portable coding practices.

Contacting the author and publisher hasn¶t helped so far. They don¶t seem to bother as long as
their book sells.

This page is intended to make the readers aware of the errors in this nasty book. The following
are just a few of the errors out of the book. There are at least 10 times more errors than what I am
listing here.

In all the code snippets given in the book:

1. The standard headers are included using double quotes ("stdio.h"), which should only be
used for user-defined headers. For standard headers, < and > delimiters should be used.

2. The last output statement is not ended with a µ\n¶, thus there is no guarantee that complete
output is displayed after execution.

3. There is no mention of return type for main function, relying on the default int type.
Though it is acceptable for older standards of C, its not valid with the current C standard
(C99), which requires functions to have explicit return type to be mentioned. And there is
no return statement given in the main function.

[


 
 



Q1.0
What would be the output of the following program?
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His answer:

42



1. size of pointer type can vary from implementation to implementation.

2. far is not a standard keyword/type qualifier.

3. sizeof doesn't return integer, it returns a value of type size_t. So using %d will cause
undefined behaviour. [This mistake repeats in all the code snippets in the book where sizeof
value is printed].

Q1.28
What do you mean by scope of a variable? What are the 4 different types of scopes that a
variable can have?

His answer:

Scope indicates the region over which the variable's declaration has an effect. The four
kinds of scopes are: file, function, block and prototype.



There are only three relevant scopes for variables: file, block, and prototype scope. There is no
function scope for variables.
Q6.3

What would be the output of the following program?

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!



 

His answer:

11

Because, on preprocessing the expression becomes a= (3 +2 * 2+ 3)



On preprocessing, it becomes: (b + 2 * b + 2), not (3 +2 * 2+ 3). Preprocessor will not replace

with value of object, but just makes text replacements. And the expression he gives (3 +2 * 2+
3) would yield the value 10, not 11.

Q7.7

What would be the output of the following program assuming that the array begins at
location 1002?

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 " #"$#

 $

%&'(
) *  



+,,, "*#!  "*#!  "*#!  !*! 



This code gives undefined output as %u is not the format specifier for pointer, %p is the only
format specifier that can be used for pointers (portably).

[This mistake repeats in all codes snippets in the book where pointer value is printed].

Q8.16

Can two different huge pointers contain two different addresses but refer the same location in
memory?



huge is not a standard C qualifier. Moreover, it was only used in 16 bit compilers, which are
obsolete these days. The "Section 8-More about pointers" is filled with questions and discussions
on far and huge pointers, which are non-standard.

Q8.8

What would be the output of the following program?

â
-,
.

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/011



His answer:

21



Size of NULL is implementation specific. It may yield the size of any integer types or of pointer
type.

Q11.11

What would be the output of the following program?

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 ,î

 


 2



 ,î 34 5
6 

 ,î 

 , .



3+6 .
 

His Answer:

DRAVID

When a structure is assigned, passed, or returned, the copying is done monolithically.

This means that the copies of any pointer fields will point to the same place as the
original. In other words, anything pointed to is not copied. Hence, on changing the name
through , it automatically .



The function call  , .tries to modify the string literal ³Dravid´, which may not be
modifiable. If the implementation stores the string literals in read-only location, the behavior is
undefined.

Q12.4

Point out the error, if any in the following program.

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.6

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,
2 

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3
-66 6

:
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36
 


-


His answer:

EOF has been defined as â   in the file ³stdio.h´ and an


  ranges from 0 to 255 hence when EOF is read from

the file it cannot be accommodated in . Solution is to declare  as an .



EOF need not always be defined with the value ±1. EOF may be defined with any other negative
integer value.

Q12.11

Point out the error in the following program.

â
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.

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=


 
=





 

His answer:

You would not get a chance to supply a character for second scanf() statement. Solution
is to precede the second scanf() with the following statement:

fflush(stdin);

This would flush out the enter hit for the previous scanf() to be flushed out from the input
stream, i.e. keyboard.



1. fflush is meant for output and update streams. Using it for input stream causes undefined
behaviour.

2. In the scanf statement, %c is used for integer , and %d for character , this may write more
than one byte to the char variable ch, causing undefined behaviour.

Q17.11

How many bytes would be allocated by the following code?

â
-,3 --.6

â

>?@<A

â

>?@B<1$

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">?@B<1#">?@<A#


">?@<A#">?@B<1#î --





His answer:

14 bytes.



1. The number of bytes allocated is dependent on size of int, which may vary from
implementation to implementation. And it would allocate at-least 24 bytes as each int
occupies at-least 2 bytes.
2. The cast for malloc return value is unnecessarily as it returns a value of type void*. [This
kind of cast repeats everywhere in the book where malloc statement is used.]

Q17.29

How much maximum memory can we allocate in a single call to malloc()?

His answer:

64 KB.



The amount of memory that could be allocated though malloc() in a single call is purely
dependant on platform and implementation. His answer is applicable only for the 16Bit DOS
environments where 64 KB was the limit.

Q20.9

How would you use the function memmove()?

 His answer:

â
-,îî.

â
-, --.

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...CB:
2

  --îîî5C



Both the headers mem.h and alloc.h are not part of C standard.

memmove function is available in the standard header <string.h>.