c - How is printf statement interpreted?

Question

How is the following line interpreted by GCC compiler:

printf("HELLO");  

I want to know this because when I am running following program:

main()  
{  
    printf(5+"Good Morning");  
}  

The program is printing:

Morning

Why is the compiler is starting the printing from the sixth character?

Answer 1

This is an artifact of C pointer-arithmetic; printf is just a red herring.

The type of a string literal (such as "Good morning") is const char *. Your code is equivalent to:

const char *p = "Good morning";
p = p + 5;
printf(p);

Adding a pointer and an integer produces a pointer to the 5th element in the sequence.