C Programming Language

C Programming Language:-

C is a programming language developed at AT & T’s Bell Laboratories of USA in 1972. It was designed and written by a man named Dennis Ritchie. In the late seventies C began to replace the more familiar languages of that time like PL/I, ALGOL, etc. No one pushed C. It wasn’t made the ‘official’ Bell Labs language. Thus, without any advertisement C’s reputation spread and its pool of users grew. Ritchie seems to have been rather surprised that so many programmers preferred C to older languages like FORTRAN or PL/I, or the newer ones like Pascal and APL. But, that's what happened.

Possibly why C seems so popular is because it is reliable, simple and easy to use. Moreover, in an industry where newer languages, tools and technologies emerge and vanish day in and day out, a language that has survived for more than 3 decades has to be really good.

History of C Programming Language:

 C is a programming language which born at “AT & T’s Bell Laboratories” of USA in 1972. It was written by Dennis Ritchie. This language was created for a specific purpose: to design the UNIX operating system (which is used on many computers). From the beginning, C was intended to be useful to allow busy programmers to get things done because C is such a powerful, dominant and supple language, its use quickly spread beyond Bell Labs in the late 70’s.

    Why Name “C” was given to Language?

 Many of its principles and ideas were taken from the earlier language B. Ken Thompson was the developer of B Language. BCPL and CPL are the earlier ancestors of B Language. CPL is common Programming Language in 1967, BCPL Language (Basic CPL) was created as a scaled down version of CPL. As many of the features were derived from B Language that’s why it was named as C. After 7-8 years C++ came into existence.

C Programming Language Timeline :

Programming Language                Development Year          Developed by

ALGOL                                                 1960                                       International Group

BCPL                                                     1967                                       Martin Richards

B                                                             1970                                       Ken Thompson

Traditional C                                      1972                                       Dennis Ritchie

K&R C                                                   1978                                       Brain Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie

ANSI C                                                 1989                                       ANSI Committee

ANSI/ISO C                                         1990                                       ISO Committee

Features of C Programming Language:-

C Programming is widely used in Computer Technology; we can say that C Programming is inspiration for development of other languages. We can use C Programming for different purposes. Below is some of the Features of C Programming language – 

1.       Low Level Features :

C Programming provides low level features that are generally provided by the Lower level languages. C is closely related to Lower level Language such as Assembly Language. It is easier to write assembly language codes in C programming.

2.       Portability :

C Programs are portable i.e. they can be run on any Compiler with little or no modification. Compiler and Pre-processor make it Possible for C Program to run it on Different PCs.

3.       Powerful:

C Provides wide verity of Data Types. It also provides wide verity of Built in Functions. It provides useful Control & Loop Control Statements.

4.       Bit Manipulation:

C Programs can be manipulated using bits. We can perform different operations at bit level. We can manage memory representation at bit level. [E.g. we can use Structure to manage Memory at Bit Level]. It provides wide verity of bit manipulation Operators. We have bitwise operators to manage Data at bit level.

5.       High Level Features :

It is more User friendly as compare to previous languages. Previous languages such as BCPL, Pascal and other programming languages never provide such great features to manage data. Previous languages have their pros and cons but C Programming collected all useful features of previous languages thus C become more effective language.

6.       Modular Programming:

Modular programming is a software design technique that increases the extent to which software is composed of separate parts, called modules. C Program consist of different modules that are integrated together to form complete program.

7.       Efficient Use of Pointers:

A pointer has direct access to memory. C Supports efficient use of pointer.

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