History and features of C

History of C Language

History of C language is interesting to know. Here we are going to discuss brief history of c language.

C programming language was developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at bell laboratories of AT&T (American Telephone & Telegraph), located in U.S.A.

Dennis Ritchie is known as the founder of c language.

It was developed to overcome the problems of previous languages such as B, BCPL etc.

Initially, C language was developed to be used in UNIX operating system. It inherits many features of previous languages such as B and BCPL.

Let's see the programming languages that were developed before C language.

Language	Year	Developed By
Algol	1960	International Group
BCPL	1967	Martin Richard
B	1970	Ken Thompson
Traditional C	1972	Dennis Ritchie
K & R C	1978	Kernighan & Dennis Ritchie
ANSI C	1989	ANSI Committee
ANSI/ISO C	1990	ISO Committee
C99	1999	Standardization Committee

Features of C language

• It is a robust language with rich set of built-in functions and operators that can be used to write any complex program.
• The C compiler combines the capabilities of an assembly language with features of a high-level language.
• Programs Written in C are efficient and fast. This is due to its variety of data type and powerful operators.
• It is many time faster than BASIC.
• C is highly portable this means that programs once written can be run on another machines with little or no modification.
• Another important feature of C program, is its ability to extend itself.
• A C program is basically a collection of functions that are supported by C library. We can also create our own function and add it to C library.
• C language is the most widely used language in operating systems and embedded system development today.