History of C Programming Language

HISTORY OF C

C is a general-purpose language which has been closely associated with the UNIX operating system for which it was developed - since the system and most of the programs that run it are written in C.

 

Many of the important ideas of C term from the language BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language), developed by Martin Richards. The influence of BCPL on C proceeded indirectly through the language B, which was written by Ken Thompson in 1970 at Bell Labs, for the first UNIX system on a DEC PDP-7. BCPL and B are "type less" languages whereas C provides a variety of data types.

 

In 1972 Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs writes C and in 1978 the publication of The C Programming Language by Kernighan & Ritchie caused a revolution in the computing world.

 

In 1983, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) established a committee to provide a modern, comprehensive definition of C. The resulting definition, the ANSI standard, or "ANSI C", was completed late 1988.

 

Today C is running in number of operating systems including MS-DOS. C stands between Problem Oriented Language (or High Level Language) and Machine Oriented Language (or Low Level Language). That’s why it is often called Middle Level Language, since it was designed to have both relatively good programming efficiency and a relatively good machine efficiency.