The C Programming Language

The C programming language is a procedural programming language and designed to be compiled using a straight-forward compiler to provide low-level access to memory, and to require minimum run-time support. Despite its low-level capabilities, the language was designed to encourage cross-platform programming. The language has become available on a verious platforms, from embedded microcontrollers to the supercomputers.

The C programming language was developed by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs in the early 1970s as an extended version of Ken Thompson's B programming language. C is a general purpose, structured programming language. By design, C provides constructs which maps machine instructions in a very efficient manner, and therefore it has ever lasting use in applications that had been coded in assembly language like, operating systems, application softwares like MS Office etc.

C language supports various characteritics:-

• Control-flow primitives
• A large number of arithmetical and logical operators
• Function return values can be ignored when not needed.
• User-defined (typedef) and compound types are possible.
• Data pointers permit dynamic memory allocation

Many later languages have borrowed directly or indirectly from C, including C++, C#, Unix's C shell, D, Go, Java, JavaScript, Limbo, LPC, Objective-C, Perl, PHP, Python, Rust, Swift etc. These languages have drawn many of their concepts & control structures and other basic features from C language. So, in other words, we must say, C is the “mother” of most of the programming language.