Hello, Out Loud

What printf does

A compiled program does not tell you anything unless you ask it to. printf is how you ask.

Whatever sits between its double quotes is written to the screen exactly as it appears — every letter, every space, every symbol. C does not tidy any of it up and does not add anything you did not type, which includes the line break at the end. If you want the next thing you print to start on its own line, you write \n inside the quotes yourself.

That is the whole idea for now. There is a compiler translating your file into machine code behind the scenes, but none of that changes what printf does: it writes text, exactly as given.

A worked example

A different program, so the answer to this exercise is not given away:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
    printf("--> ready\n");
    printf("--> steady\n");
    printf("--> go\n");
    return 0;
}

Running that prints three lines:

--> ready
--> steady
--> go

Three printf calls, three lines of output, in the order they appear in the file. Each call ends with \n, which is why each one lands on its own line rather than all three running together.

Your turn

The editor already holds a working program. It prints a banner: a row of = signs, two lines of text, then another row of = signs.

One thing is missing. The second line says YOUR NAME instead of your name.

Replace those two words with your own name, keep the quotes and the \n exactly where they are, and press Run.

That is the entire task. You are not expected to write a line from scratch yet.

If something goes wrong

If the compiler complains, it is almost always the quotes. The text you want printed has to sit between them — "Hello, Sam!\n" works, Hello, Sam!\n on its own does not, because without quotes the compiler reads Hello as the name of something in the program rather than as text to print, and it will not guess what you meant.

Nothing you do here can break anything permanently. Change it, run it, change it again.