Sunday, 16 September 2012

C Interview Questions-2


1. Out of fgets() and gets() which function is safe to use and why?
Ans: fgets() is safer than gets(), because we can specify a maximum input length. Neither one is completely safe, because the compiler can’t prove that programmer won’t overflow the buffer he pass to fgets ().

2. Difference between strdup and strcpy?
Ans: Both copy a string. strcpy wants a buffer to copy into. strdup allocates a buffer using malloc().
Unlike strcpy(), strdup() is not specified by ANSI .

3. What is recursion?
Ans: A recursion function is one which calls itself either directly or indirectly it must halt at a definite point to avoid infinite recursion.

4. Differentiate between for loop and a while loop? What are it uses?
Ans: For executing a set of statements fixed number of times we use for loop while when the number of
iterations to be performed is not known in advance we use while loop.

5. What is storage class? What are the different storage classes in C?
Ans: Storage class is an attribute that changes the behavior of a variable. It controls the lifetime, scope and linkage. The storage classes in c are auto, register, and extern, static, typedef.

6. What the advantages of using Unions?
Ans: When the C compiler is allocating memory for unions it will always reserve enough room for the
largest member.

7. What is the difference between Strings and Arrays?
Ans: String is a sequence of characters ending with NULL .it can be treated as a one dimensional array
of characters terminated by a NULL character.

8. What is a far pointer? Where we use it?
Ans: In large data model (compact, large, huge) the address B0008000 is acceptable because in these
model all pointers to data are 32bits long. If we use small data model(tiny, small, medium) the above address won’t work since in these model each pointer is 16bits long. If we are working in a small data model and want to access the address B0008000 then we use far pointer. Far pointer is always treated as a 32bit pointer and contains a segment address and offset address both of 16bits each. Thus the address is represented using segment : offset format B000h:8000h. For any given memory address there are many possible far address segment : offset pair. The segment register contains the address where the segment begins and offset register contains the offset of data/code from where segment begins.

9. What is a huge pointer?
Ans: Huge pointer is 32bit long containing segment address and offset address. Huge pointers are
normalized pointers so for any given memory address there is only one possible huge address segment: offset pair. Huge pointer arithmetic is doe with calls to special subroutines so its arithmetic slower than any other pointers.

10. What is a normalized pointer, how do we normalize a pointer?
Ans: It is a 32bit pointer, which has as much of its value in the segment register as possible. Since
a segment can start every 16bytes so the offset will have a value from 0 to F. for normalization convert the address into 20bit address then use the 16bit for segment address and 4bit for the offset address. Given a pointer 500D: 9407,we convert it to a 20bitabsolute address 549D7,Which then normalized to 549D:0007.

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