C Language Overview

   C is a structured programming language developed by Dennis M. Ritchie in 1970s at AT&T Bell laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey.  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.

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.

To assure that the C language remains standard, in 1983, ANSI (American National Standards Institute) appointed a technical committee to define a standard for C. The committee approved a version of C in 1989 which is now known as ANSI C. It was then approved by the International Standards Organization (ISO) in 1990. 

Features of C language

• C is a robust language whose rich set of built-in functions and operators can be used to write any complex program.

• The C compiler combines the capabilities of an assembly language with the features of a high – level language and therefore it is well suited for writing both system software and business packages. In fact, many of the C compilers available in the market are written in C. 

• Programs written in C are efficient and fast. This is due to its variety of data types and powerful operators. 

• C is a portable language. Portable means that a C program written for one computer system can be compiled and run on another system with little or no modification. Portability is important if we plan to use a new computer with a different operating system. 

• C is a language of few words, containing only a handful of terms, called keywords (if, else, for, break etc), which serve as the base on which the language's functionality is built.

• C is modular. C code can be written in routines called functions. These functions can be reused in other applications or programs. By passing pieces of information to the functions, you can create useful, reusable code. 

 

 
 

Latest Version of C

The current latest version of C language is C11(formerly C1X)  is an informal name for ISO/IEC 9899:2011, which was introduced in 2011. It is supported by all the standard C language compilers.

The C11 standard adds numerous new features to C and the library, including type generic macros, anonymous structures, improved Unicode support, atomic operations, multi-threading, and bounds-checked functions. It also makes some portions of the existing C99 library optional, and improves compatibility with C++. The standard macro __STDC_VERSION__ is defined as 201112L to indicate that C11 support is available.

Structure of C Programs

Index