HISTORY AND FEATURES OF C LANGUAGE

 History of C Language

Dennis Ritchie - founder of C language

History of C language is interesting to know. Here we are going to discuss a brief history of the c language.

C programming language was developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at bell laboratories of AT&T (American Telephone & Telegraph), located in the U.S.A.

Dennis Ritchie is known as the founder of the c language.

It was developed to overcome the problems of previous languages such as B, BCPL, etc.

Initially, C language was developed to be used in UNIX operating system. It inherits many features of previous languages such as B and BCPL.

Let's see the programming languages that were developed before C language.

Language Year           Developed By

Algol        1960         International Group

BCPL         1967         Martin Richard

B                 1970  Ken Thompson

Traditional C 1972 Dennis Ritchie

K & R C         1978  Kernighan & Dennis Ritchie

ANSI C         1989   ANSI Committee

ANSI/ISO C 1990  ISO Committee

C99                 1999  Standardization Committee

Features of C Language

C features

C is the widely used language. It provides many features that are given below.

Simple

Machine Independent or Portable

Mid-level programming language

structured programming language

Rich Library

Memory Management

Fast Speed

Pointers

Recursion

Extensible

1) Simple

C is a simple language in the sense that it provides a structured approach (to break the problem into parts), the rich set of library functions, data types, etc.

2) Machine Independent or Portable

Unlike assembly language, c programs can be executed on different machines with some machine specific changes. Therefore, C is a machine independent language.

3) Mid-level programming language

Although, C is intended to do low-level programming. It is used to develop system applications such as kernel, driver, etc. It also supports the features of a high-level language. That is why it is known as mid-level language.

4) Structured programming language

C is a structured programming language in the sense that we can break the program into parts using functions. So, it is easy to understand and modify. Functions also provide code reusability.

5) Rich Library

C provides a lot of inbuilt functions that make the development fast.

6) Memory Management

It supports the feature of dynamic memory allocation. In C language, we can free the allocated memory at any time by calling the free() function.

7) Speed

The compilation and execution time of C language is fast since there are lesser inbuilt functions and hence the lesser overhead.

8) Pointer

C provides the feature of pointers. We can directly interact with the memory by using the pointers. We can use pointers for memory, structures, functions, array, etc.

9) Recursion

In C, we can call the function within the function. It provides code reusability for every function. Recursion enables us to use the approach of backtracking.

10) Extensible

C language is extensible because it can easily adopt new features.