Understanding variables

- A variable is a container for some type of data.…In the C language that container holds an integer,…floating point, character, or other value.…But philosophically speaking, what actually is a variable?…In this movie I help you explore the concept of the variable.…You'll see various ways a variable is described,…how to determine its size and its storage location.…In the typical C language variable declaration…you learn two tidbits about the variable.…

Its type and its name.…Here you see an integer variable declared.…It's an integer variable, int, and its name is a.…The variable is uninitialized or never assigned a value.…Even so, you can use it in the code as is shown…in line 7, Build and Run the program.…On my screen, the value of a is equal to 50.…You might see the value zero, although that's just random.…Unlike other programming languages,…C does not initialize variables as they're declared.…

Internally, the program allocates a chunk…of memory to store the variable's information.…That chunk isn't initialized, it's not set to zero.…