C

Overview

"C" is a general-purpose, procedural computer programming language supporting structured programming, lexical variable scope, and recursion, with a static type system. By design, "C" provides constructs that map efficiently to typical machine instructions, and therefore it has found lasting use in applications that had formerly been coded in assembly language, including operating systems, as well as various application software for computers ranging from supercomputers to embedded systems.

History

"C" was originally developed at Bell Laboratories by Dennis M. Ritchie between 1972 and 1973 to develop utilities running on Unix. It was applied to re-implementing the kernel of the Unix operating system. During the 1980s, "C" gradually gained popularity. It has become one of the most widely used programming languages, with "C" compilers from various vendors available for the majority of existing computer architectures and operating systems.

Design

"C" is an imperative procedural language. It was designed to be compiled using a relatively straightforward compiler to provide low-level access to memory and language constructs that map efficiently to machine instructions, all with minimal runtime support. Despite its low-level capabilities, the language was designed to encourage cross-platform programming. A standards-compliant and portably written "C" program can be compiled for a very wide variety of computer platforms and operating systems with few changes to its source code.

Syntax

The syntax of "C" can be defined by the use of regular expressions and a number of specific production rules. The source character set is divided into whitespace sequences and tokens. A token is a sequence of characters that collectively have a syntactic meaning. The categories of tokens are identifiers, keywords, constants, string literals, and operators.

Data types

"C" provides a range of data types. The "C" language includes standard libraries with several functions for handling files, strings, and other types of data. The standard library provides a set of built-in functions that your program can call. Most of the state-of-the-art software have been implemented using "C".

Memory management

One of the most important functions of a programming language is to provide facilities for managing memory and the objects that are stored in memory. "C" provides three distinct ways to allocate memory for objects: static memory allocation, automatic memory allocation, and dynamic memory allocation.

Libraries

The "C" programming language uses libraries as its primary method of extension. Libraries in "C" are collections of precompiled routines, also known as functions, that your programs can use. The libraries of a programming language are the building blocks that help you create robust and efficient programs.

Influence

"C" has been influential in the development of many other languages, such as C++, C#, Java, and many others. It has also influenced operating systems, and a variety of application software.