Why do I have to specify data type each time in C?

Question

As you can see from the code snippet below, I have declared one char variable and one int variable. When the code gets compiled, it must identify t

Answer 1

printf is not an intrinsic function. It's not part of the C language per se. All the compiler does is generate code to call printf, passing whatever parameters. Now, because C does not provide reflection as a mechanism to figure out type information at run time, the programmer has to explicitly provide the needed info.