What is C Programming Language? Basics, Introduction,history
What is C Programming Langauge?
C is a general-purpose programming language supporting structured programming, lexical variable scope, and recursion, with a static type system. By design, C provides constructs that map efficiently to typical machine instructions. It has found lasting use in applications previously coded in assembly language. Such applications include operating systems and various application software for computer architectures that range from supercomputers to PLCs and embedded systems.
C is extremely popular, simple, and flexible to use.Also C is extensively used to write various applications, Operating Systems like Windows, and many other complex programs like Oracle database, Git, Python interpreter, and more.
C is a base for the programming. If you know C, you can easily grasp the knowledge of the other programming languages that uses the concept of C.
A short history of C language
The base or father of programming languages is ‘ALGOL.’ It was first introduced in 1960. ‘ALGOL’ was used on a large basis in European countries. ‘ALGOL’ introduced the concept of structured programming to the developer community. In 1967, a new computer programming language was announced called as ‘BCPL’ which stands for Basic Combined Programming Language. BCPL was designed and developed by Martin Richards, especially for writing system software. This was the era of programming languages. Just after three years, in 1970 a new programming language called ‘B’ was introduced by Ken Thompson that contained multiple features of ‘BCPL.’ This programming language was created using UNIX operating system at AT&T and Bell Laboratories. Both the ‘BCPL’ and ‘B’ were system programming languages.
In 1972, a great computer scientist Dennis Ritchie created a new programming language called ‘C’ at the Bell Laboratories. It was created from ‘ALGOL’, ‘BCPL’ and ‘B’ programming languages. ‘C’ programming language contains all the features of these languages and many more additional concepts that make it unique from other languages.
C Basic Commands
Following are the basic commands in C programming language:
Why learn C Language?
As we studied earlier, C is a base language for many programming languages. So, learning C as the main language will play an important role while studying other programming languages. It shares the same concepts such as data types, operators, control statements and many more. C can be used widely in various applications. It is a simple language and provides faster execution. There are many jobs available for a C developer in the current market.
C is a structured programming language in which program is divided into various modules. Each module can be written separately and together it forms a single C program. This structure makes it easy for testing, maintaining and debugging processes.
C contains 32 keywords, various data types and a set of powerful built-in functions that make programming very efficient.
Another feature of C programming is that it can extend itself. A C program contains various functions which are part of a library. We can add our features and functions to the library. We can access and use these functions anytime we want in our program. This feature makes it simple while working with complex programming.
Various compilers are available in the market that can be used for executing programs written in this language.
It is a highly portable language which means programs written in C language can run on other machines. This feature is essential if we wish to use or execute the code on another computer.
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