C is
a general-purpose, high-level language that was originally developed by Dennis
M. Ritchie to develop the UNIX operating system at Bell Labs. C was originally
first implemented on the DEC PDP-11 computer in 1972.
In
1978, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie produced the first publicly available
description of C, now known as the K&R standard.
The
UNIX operating system, the C compiler, and essentially all UNIX application
programs have been written in C. C has now become a widely used professional
language for various reasons:
Structured language
It produces efficient programs
It can handle low-level activities
It
can be compiled on a variety of computer platforms
Facts
about C:
C was invented to write an operating system called
UNIX.
C is a successor of B language which was
introduced around the early 1970s.
The language was formalized in 1988 by the
American National Standard Institute (ANSI).
The UNIX OS was totally written in C.
Today C is the most widely used and popular System
Programming Language.
Most of the state-of-the-art software have been
implemented using C.
Today's most popular Linux OS and RDBMS MySQL have been written in C.
Why
Use C?
C was
initially used for system development work, particularly the programs that
make-up the operating system. C was adopted as a system development language
because it produces code that runs nearly as fast as the code written in
assembly language. Some examples of the use of C might be:
Operating Systems
Language Compilers
Assemblers
Text Editors
Print Spoolers
Network Drivers
Modern Programs
Databases
Language Interpreters
Utilities
C Programs:
A C program can vary from 3 lines to millions of lines and it
should be written into one or more text files with extension ".c";
for example, hello.c. You can use "vi", "vim"
or any other text editor to write your C program into a file.
This tutorial assumes
that you know how to edit a text file and how to write source code inside a
program file.
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