[Guide for C] Overview of C Language

Overview of C Language

C is a structured programming language developed by Dennis Ritchie in 1973 at Bell Laboratories. It is one of the most popular computer languages today because of its structure, high-level abstraction, machine independent feature etc. C language was developed to write the UNIX operating system, hence it is strongly associated with UNIX, which is one of the most popular network operating system in use today and heart of internet data superhighway.


History of C language

C language has evolved from three different structured language ALGOL, BCPL and B Language. It uses many concepts from these languages while introduced many new concepts such as datatypes, struct, pointer etc. In 1988, the language was formalised by American National Standard Institute(ANSI). In 1990, a version of C language was approved by the International Standard Organisation(ISO) and that version of C is also referred to as C89.





The idea behind creating C language was to create an easy language which requires a simple compiler and enables programmers to efficiently interact with the machine/system, just like machine instructions.

C language compiler converts the readable C language program into machine instruction.
Why C Language is so popular?

C language is a very good language to introduce yourself to the programming world, as it is a simple procedural language which is capable of doing wonders.

Programs written in C language takes very less time to execute and almost executes at the speed of assembly language instructions.

Initially C language was mainly used for writing system level programs, like designing operating systems, but there are other applications as well which can be very well designed and developed using C language, like Text Editors, Compilers, Network Drivers etc.
Latest Version of C

The current latest version of C language is C11, which was introduced in 2011. It is supported by all the standard C language compilers.

Many new features have been introduced in this version and an overall attempt to improve compatibility of the C language with C++ language has been made. We will learn about the C11edition, once we are done with learning C language, towards the end of this tutorial series.