History & Characteristics of 'C'

History:

    In earlier days, every language was designed for some specific purpose. For example FORTRAN (Formula Translator) was used for scientific and mathematical applications, COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) were used for business applications. So need of such a language was felt which could withstand most of the purposes. "Necessity is the mother of invention". From here the first step towards C was put forward by Dennis Ritchie.

     The C language was developed in 1970's at Bell laboratories by Dennis Ritchie. Initially it was designed for programming in the operating system called UNIX. After the advent of C, the whole UNIX operating system was rewritten using it. Now almost the entire UNIX operating system and the tools supplied with it including the C compiler itself are written in C.

    The C language is derived from the B language, which was written by Ken Thompson at AT&T Bell Laboratories. The B language was adopted from a language called BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language), which was developed by Martin Richards at Cambridge University.

    In 1982 a committee was formed by ANSI (American National Standards Institute) to standardize the C language. Finally in 1989, the standard for C language was introduced known as ANSI C. Generally most of the modern compilers conform to this standard.

Characteristics:

It is a middle level language. It has the simplicity of a high level language as well as the power of low level language. This aspect of C makes it suitable for writing both application programs and system programs. Hence it is an excellent, efficient and general-purpose language for most of the application such as mathematical, scientific, business and system software applications.

C is small language, consisting of only 32 English words known as keywords (if, else, for, break etc.). The power of C is augmented by the library functions provided with it. Moreover, the language is extensible since it allows the users to add their own library functions to the library.

C contains control constructs needed to write a structured program hence it is considered a structure programming language. It includes structures for selection (if.. .else, switch), repetition (while, for, do... while) and for loop exit (break).

The programs written in C are portable i.e. programs written for one type of computer or operating system can be run on another type of computer or operating system.