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C Language - Overview

C was originally developed by Dennis Ritchie in the early 1970s at Bell Labs to create the UNIX operating system. It produces efficient and portable programs and can handle both high- and low-level activities. C became widely popular for systems programming due to producing fast code and being able to interface with hardware. Modern operating systems, databases, networks and interpreters have been written in C.

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38 views

C Language - Overview

C was originally developed by Dennis Ritchie in the early 1970s at Bell Labs to create the UNIX operating system. It produces efficient and portable programs and can handle both high- and low-level activities. C became widely popular for systems programming due to producing fast code and being able to interface with hardware. Modern operating systems, databases, networks and interpreters have been written in C.

Uploaded by

ajwa tel
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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3/11/23, 10:55 AM C Language - Overview

C Language - Overview

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 (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
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3/11/23, 10:55 AM C Language - Overview

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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