Prior to writing C programs, it would be interesting to find out what really is C language, how it came into existence and where does it stand with respect to other computer languages. We will briefly outline these issues in the following section.

History of C

C is a programming language developed at AT&T’s Bell Laboratory of USA in 1972. It was designed and written by Dennis Ritchie. As compared to other programming languages such as Pascal, C allows a precise control of input and output. 25 Now let us see its historical development. Basics of C The late 1960s were a turbulent era for computer systems research at Bell Telephone Laboratories. By 1960, many programming languages came into existence, almost each for a specific purpose. For example COBOL was being used for Commercial or Business Applications, FORTRAN for Scientific Applications and so on. So, people started thinking why could not there be a one general purpose language. Therefore, an International Committee was set up to develop such a language, which came out with the invention of ALGOL60. But this language never became popular because it was too abstract and too general. To improve this, a new language called Combined Programming Language (CPL) was developed at Cambridge University. But this language was very complex in the sense that it had too many features and it was very difficult to learn. Martin Richards at Cambridge University reduced the features of CPL and developed a new language called Basic Combined Programming Language (BCPL). But unfortunately it turned out to be much less powerful and too specific. Ken Thompson at AT & T’s Bell Labs, developed a language called B at the same time as a further simplification of CPL. But like BCPL this was also too specific. Ritchie inherited the features of B and BCPL and added some features on his own and developed a language called C. C proved to be quite compact and coherent. Ritchie first implemented C on a DEC PDP-11 that used the UNIX Operating System.

For many years the de facto standard for C was the version supplied with the UNIX version 5 operating system. The growing popularity of microcomputers led to the creation of large number of C implementations. At the source code level most of these implementations were highly compatible. However, since no standard existed there were discrepancies. To overcome this situation, ANSI established a committee in 1983 that defined an ANSI standard for the C language.

Salient features of C

C is a general purpose, structured programming language. Among the two types of programming languages discussed earlier, C lies in between these two categories. That’s why it is often called a middle level language. It means that it combines the elements of high level languages with the functionality of assembly language. It provides relatively good programming efficiency (as compared to machine oriented language) and relatively good machine efficiency as compared to high level languages). As a middle level language, C allows the manipulation of bits, bytes and addresses – the basic elements with which the computer executes the inbuilt and memory management functions. C code is very portable, that it allows the same C program to be run on machines with different hardware configurations. The flexibility of C allows it to be used for systems programming as well as for application programming.

C is commonly called a structured language because of structural similarities to ALGOL and Pascal. The distinguishing feature of a structured language is compartmentalization of code and data. Structured language is one that divides the entire program into modules using top-down approach where each module executes one job or task. It is easy for debugging, testing, and maintenance if a language is a structured one. C supports several control structures such as while, do-while and for and various data structures such as strucs, files, arrays etc. as would be seen in the later units. The basic unit of a C program is a function - C’s standalone subroutine. The structural component of C makes the programming and maintenance easier.