About C language

Overview of C language

C is a structured programming language developed by Dennis Ritchie in 1973 at Bell Laboratories of AT&T(American  Telephone & Telegraph), located in the U.S.A. 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 formalized 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.

C language compiler converts the readable C language program into machine instruction.

Features of C language

C language is the widely used language and it provides a lot of features that are:

1. Simple: It provides structural approach, set of library functions, data types,etc.
2. Machine Independent or Portable: It can be executed on many machines. It is not platform independent.
3. Mid-level programming language: It is also used to do low-level programming. It also supports the feature of high-level language.
4. Structured programming language: It can break the program into parts using functions. So, it is easy to understand and modify.
5. Rich Library: It provides 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 free() function.
7. Fast Speed: The compilation and execution time is fast.
8. Pointers: We can use pointers for memory, structures, functions, arrays,etc.
9. Recursion: We can call the function within the function.
10. Extensible: It is extensible because it can easily adopt the new features.

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.