C Programming Professional Made easys (2015)
Chapter 2 What is C Programming Language?
In C, the programming language is a language that focuses on the structure. It was developed in 1972, at Bell Laboratories, by Dennis Ritchie. The features of the language were derived from “B”, which is an earlier programming language and formally known as BCPL or Basic Combined Programming Language. The C programming language was originally developed to implement the UNIX operating system.
Standards of C Programming Language
In 1989, the American National Standards Institute developed the 1st standard specifications. This pioneering standard specification was referred to as C89 and C90, both referring to the same programming language.
In 1999, a revision was made in the programming language. The revised standard was called C99. It had new features such as advanced data types. It also had a few changes, which gave rise to more applications.
The C11 standard was developed, which added new features to the programming language for C. This had a library-like generic macro type, enhanced Unicode support, anonymous structures, multi-threading, bounds-checked functions and atomic structures. It had improved compatibility with C++. Some parts of the C99 library in C11 were made optional.
The Embedded C programming language included a few features that were not part of C. These included the named address spaces, basic I/O hardware addressing and fixed point arithmetic.
C Programming Language Features
There are a lot of features of the programming language, which include the following:
· Modularity
· Interactivity
· Portability
· Reliability
· Effectiveness
· Efficiency
· Flexibility
Uses of the C Programming Language
This language has found several applications. It is now used for the development of system applications, which form a huge portion of operating systems such as Linux, Windows and UNIX.
Some of the applications of C language include the following:
· Spreadsheets
· Database systems
· Word processors
· Graphics packages
· Network drivers
· Compilers and Assemblers
· Operating system development
· Interpreters