C Language and its History

C is a middle level programming language developed by Dennis Ritchie while working at AT&T Bell Labs in USA.
– The objective of its development was in the context of the re-design of the UNIX operating system to enable it to be used on multiple computers.
– Earlier the language B was now used for improving the UNIX system. Being a high level language, B allowed much faster production of code than in assembly language.
– Still, B suffered from drawbacks as it did not understand data-types and did not provide the use of “structures”.
– To overcome the drawbacks Dennis Ritchie develop a new programming language called C.
– He kept most of language B’s syntax and added data-types and many other required changes.
– Eventually C was developed during 1972, containing both high-level functionality and the detailed features required to program an operating system. Hence, many of the UNIX components including UNIX kernel itself were eventually rewritten in C.

  1. C is a structured programming language developed by Dennis Ritchie in 1972 at Bell Laboratories, USA. It is one of the most popular computer languages today because of its structure, high-level abstraction, machine independent feature.
  2. C language is not tied to any particular operating system. It can be used to develop new operating system.
  3. The C programs are efficient, fast and highly portable. i.e. C programs written on one computer can be run on another with more or almost no modification.
  1. C language has evolved from three different structured language ALGOL, BCPL(Basic combined programming language) and B Language(B language is developed by Ken Thompson in 1970).
  2. C is also called an offspring of the BCPL.
  3. BCPL and B are data type less language. However, C language has a variety of data types.
  4. It uses many concepts from these languages and introduced many new concepts such as data types, struct , pointer.
  5. In 1989, the C language was standardizes by American National Standard Institute(ANSI).
  6. In 1990, a version of C language was approved by the International Standard Organisation(ISO) and that version of C is also referred to as C89.