regarding the output in C....

[newkush2010]

hello frnds

m kushal..... i wrote a program as follows

#include<stdio.h>
#include<conio.h>
 
mail()
{
 
int a=39;
 
printf("the value of a is  %*d" ,a);
 
getchar();
 

}


the output at the console is ....207408-------WHY SO?

[Laharl]

The * flag in printf does something special, I'm not entirely sure what, but ("%*.*d", a, b, c) allows you to pass in arguments for the precision, so I'd guess this works something similarly. My guess would be it prints out something, dunno what, to a precision of 39 digits and pads with spaces what it can't display as a number.

When I use that code on gcc 4.1.3, I get a long string of spaces and then a large negative number.

Also, conio is nonstandard. Don't use it if you can use something more standardized.

[sicarie]

There is no way this compiled or ran. If you ran the above, you did not get output at all related to what you wanted.

As someone else said, don't use conio, but where you should have your main, you have mail(). You should be using int main(), and that should return 0 at the end of your program.