Monday, November 3, 2014
C Programming Language:
In computing, C is a general-purpose programming language initially developed by Dennis Ritchie between 1969 and 1973 at AT&T Bell Labs.
Like most imperative languages(In computer science terminologies, imperative programming is a programming paradigm(A programming paradigm is a fundamental style of computer programming, a way of building the structure and elements of computer programs.) that describes computation in terms of statements that change a program state.) in the ALGOL(ALGOrithmic Language) tradition, C has facilities for structured programming(aimed at improving the clarity, quality, and development time of a program) and allows lexical variable scope and recursion(a method where the solution to a problem depends on solutions to smaller instances of the same problem), while a static type system prevents many unintended operations.
Its design provides constructs that map efficiently to typical machine instructions(a set of instructions executed directly by a computer), and therefore it has found lasting use in applications that had formerly been coded in assembly language(An assembly language is a low-level programming language for a computer, or other programmable device, in which there is a very strong (generally one-to-one) correspondence between the language and the architecture's machine code instructions), most notably system software(computer software designed to operate and control the computer hardware) like the Unix(a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system that exists in many variants) computer operating system(An operating system (OS) is software that manages computer hardware and software resources and provides common services for computer programs).
Many later languages have borrowed directly or indirectly from C, including D, Go, Rust, Java, JavaScript, Limbo, LPC, C#, Objective-C, Perl, PHP, Python etc.
Design of C Language:
C is an imperative (procedural) language. It was designed to be compiled using a relatively straightforward compiler, to provide low-level access to memory, to provide language constructs that map efficiently to machine instructions, and to require minimal run-time support. C was therefore useful for many applications that had formerly been coded in assembly language, such as in system programming.Given below is the simplest code written in C which displays Hello Wolrd! to the user.
/* Hello World program */
#include<stdio.h>
main()
{
printf("Hello World");
}
This is just some introduction to the C Programming language.
However, it is a vast and powerful language which can be used for different purposes.
