Learnings of the Week- Joannacel A. Paraiso

Overview of C Language

History of C Language

• B was developed in the year 1970 by Ken Thompson. The said language is a successor of Basic Command Programming Language (BCPL), which was developed by Martin Richards.
• Dennis Ritchie invented and first implemented the C Programming Language in Bell Laboratory.
• C was originally developed under UNIX environment running in DEC PDP-11. "C" stands for Combined Programming Language and sometimes called System Programming Language (SPL).
• It did not become immediately popular after its creation. It took almost six years when many people read and learned the usefulness of the language after Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie created a famous book called “THE C PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE”.
• X3J11 committee -> was created in the year 1983 under the American National Standard Institute (ANSI) to provide machine definition of the language and was than approved in 1989.
• ANSI cooperated with the International Standard Organization (ISO) to refer to as ANSI/ISO 9899:1990”.
• C is often called a middle-level language. C as a middle-level language means that it combines elements of high-level language with the functionalism of assembly language. It allows manipulation of bits, bytes, and addresses the basic elements with which the computer functions.
• Input commands, output commands, and special words often referred to as reserved words allow the use of lower case only.
• They should be written in lower case since C is sensitive to those words. They have only 32 keywords (27 from Kernighan and Ritchie standard and 5 added by the ANSI Standardization Committee.
• C was initially used for system development work, in particular the programs that make up the operating system.
• C is used mainly because it produces codes that run as fast as codes written in assembly language.

Examples Uses of C

• Operating system
• Language compilers
• Assemblers
• Text editors
• Print spoolers
• Network devices
• Modern programs
• Databases
• Language Interpreters Utilities

Features of C Languages

> A simple core language, such as math functions or file handling provided by a standard set of library routines.

> C encourages the creation of libraries user-defined functions.

> C is flexible when it allows unrestricted conversion of data from one type to another, such as conversion of a character to its numeric equivalent.