C is a powerful,portable and elegantly structured programming language. since C combine the feature of high level language with element of assembler, it is suitable for both systems as well application programming. It is undoubtedly the most widely used general-purpose language in operating system development.Its infulence is evident in almost all modern programming language.since its standaradization in 1989 ,C has undergoes a series of change and improvement in order to enhance the usefulness of the language ,the version that incorporates in order to enhance the usefulness of the language. The version that incorporates the new feature is now referred to as C99
It is the most popular computer language today because it is structured,high level,machine independent language.It allows software developer to develop program without worring about the hardware performs where they will be implemented.
History Of C Programming
The root of all modern language is ALGOL,introduced in early 1960s.ALGOL was the first computer language but it never popular in USA but it was widely used in Europe.C was evloved from ALGOL,BCPL and B by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Lab.
C uses many concept from these language and added the concept of data type and other features.C was originally designed for and implemened in the UNIX operating system on DEC PDP-11 by Dennis Ritchie.The operating system,C complier are written in C.
Importance of C
It is a roboust language whose rich set of built-in functions and operators can be used to write any type of program.It is many faster than BASIC.For example, a program to increment a variable from 5 to 17000 takes about one seconds while it takes more than 40 seconds in an interpreter BASIC.
C has abilty to extend itself.C program is basically a collection of functions that are supported by C Library. We can continuously add our functions to c library. with the availablity of large number of functions,the programming tasks become simple.
It is portable,so programs once written in C can be run on another machines easily.