Very confused

I'm looking at K&R right now, and I just realized I've been wondering something for quite a while now.

In the functions chapter, they outline a reverse Polish calculator which uses the following code to determine if a number is a digit or not:

Code:

/*main.c*/
#include  <stdio.h>
#include <math.h>
#include "calc.h"

#define MAXOP 100
#define NUMBER '0'

int main(void)
{
int type;
double op2;
char s[MAXOP];

while((type = getop(s)) != EOF){
		switch(type){
		case NUMBER:
				push(atof(s));
				break;
		case '+':
				push(pop() + pop());
				break;
		case '*':
				push(pop() * pop());
				break;
		case '-':
				op2 = pop();
				push(pop() - op2);
				break;
		case '/':
				op2 = pop();
				if(op2 != 0.0)
					    push(pop() / op2);
				else
					    printf("Error: zero divisor!\n");
				break;
		case '\n':
				printf("\t%.8g\n", pop());
				break;
		case 'q':
				printf("Exiting...\n");
				return 0;
		default:
			    printf("Error: unknown command %s.\n", s);
				break;
				}
		}

This isn't all the code, but it's enough to see what I want to know: basically, how does

Code:

define NUMBER 100

signal that a number has been found? I am not sure how comparing type to NUMBER would ever return true unless type was equal to 0 anyway.

If you assume that getop() reads in a string, and returns either an operator (eg '+') or the value which is in NUMBER, depending on what was typed in.

In short, look at the code for getop(), or read about it if it's some predefined function.

Oh, right... I totally missed that somehow. Prolly because I've been trying to read this book straight through without writing any code to practice, because I can't make Linux work properly at the moment.

On that subject, anyone know where I can get shell/compiler access, without HUGE(>1 second) command delays?

>>anyone know where I can get shell/compiler access, without
>>HUGE(>1 second) command delays?
You mean from a C program? Calling a system command processor will always be slower than you'd like because it has to make external requests to the environment. However, you may find that nonportable functions like exec* or spawn* are faster at it than the standard system function.