I would like to create a wireless network from a laptop. If laptops come within range, I would like it to send them a welcome message and send them a goodbye message when they leave the wifi range. Is it possible to do this in C?
Please help me out with this.
It is possible, but it is a very complex task and I don't think that programming language choice is the first thing to look into.
As a start, you can read up on Wikipedia on Wireless ad-hoc networks.
How should your messages be received and displayed on the remote side? If you want to use some existing protocol over TCP/IP, or create your own (deploying custom applications on the remote machines), you will need to mess with networks and this is not always possible as one machine can be a part of only one network. So the machines need to be not connected to anything and somehow allow you to connect to them, it involves changing network settings on all that machines (for example, setting them to join the ad-hoc network with predefined name).
If all machines automatically join the existing network, this question has nothing to do with wireless (physical layer) but with Avahi, Netbios or whatever other services allowing you to get notifications and/or enumerate devices in the network.