History of C programming- With FREE PDF Download
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# History of C programming
C is closely associated with Unix Operating system.
C is a programming language developed at AT & T’s Bell Laboratories of USA in 1972. It was designed and written by a man named Dennis Ritchie. In the late seventies C began to replace the more familiar languages of that time like PL/I, ALGOL, etc. No one pushed C. It wasn’t made the ‘official’ Bell Labs language.
Thus, without any advertisement C’s reputation spread and its pool of users grew. Ritchie seems to have been rather surprised that so many programmers preferred C to older languages like FORTRAN or PL/I, or the newer ones like Pascal and APL. But, that’s what happened.
Possibly why C seems so popular is because it is reliable, simple and easy to use. Moreover, in an industry where newer languages,
tools and technologies emerge and vanish day in and day out, a language that has survived for more than 3 decades has to be really
good.
An opinion that is often heard today is – “C has been already superceded by languages like C++, C# and Java.
# Development of Unix System
The PDP-11 version of Unix system was written in assembly language. Assembly languages are low-level programming languages that are specific to a particular computer architecture. They are hard to write and understand.
The developers of Unix Operating system (including Dennis Ritchie and Stephen C. Johnson) decided to rewrite the system in B language. However, B couldn’t suffice some of the features of PDP-11, which led to the development of C.
In 1972, the development of C started on the PDP-11 Unix system. A large part of Unix was then rewritten in C. By 1973, C was powerful enough to be used in Unix Kernel. Dennis Ritchie and Stephen C. Johnson made further changes to the language for several years to make it portable in Unix Operating system.
# First Book on C Programming
In 1978, the first book of C programming, The C Programming Language, was published. The first edition of the book provided programmers informal specification of the language. Written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, this book is popular among C programmers as “K&R”.
ANSI C
With the rapid growth of C language for several years, it was time for language to get it standardized.
C89. The first standard of C was published by American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in 1989. This version is commonly popular as C89.
C99. In late 1990’s, several new features like inline functions, several new data types and flexible array-members were added to the C standard. This is commonly known as C99.
C11. The C11 standard has new features like type generic macros, atomic operations, anonymous structures that doesn’t exist in C99.
All these three standards are also known by the name of ANSI C.
“Standard C programs are portable”. This means, the programs that follow ANSI C standard are portable among operating systems.
If you are new to programming, it’s advisable to follow the standard (ANSI C in case of C programming) that is accepted everywhere. It will help you learn the language the way it was intended.
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