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2 C Language Overview

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rash
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© © All Rights Reserved
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C LANGUAGE - OVERVIEW

https://www.tutorialspoint.com/cprogramming/c_overview.htm Copyright © tutorialspoint.com

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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 −

Easy to learn
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 AN S I .

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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