C Programming Tutorial

History of C Language

        C was developed at Bell Laboratories in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie. Many of its principles and ideas were taken from the earlier language B and B's earlier ancestors BCPL and CPL. CPL ( Combined Programming Language ) was developed with the purpose of creating a language that was capable of both high level, machine independent programming and would still allow the programmer to control the behavior of individual bits of information. The one major drawback of CPL was that it was too large for use in many applications. In 1967, BCPL ( Basic CPL ) was created as a scaled down version of CPL while still retaining its basic features. In 1970, Ken Thompson, while working at Bell Labs, took this process further by developing the B language. B was a scaled down version of BCPL written specifically for use in systems programming. Finally in 1972, a co-worker of Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, returned some of the generality found in BCPL to the B language in the process of developing the language we now know as C.

         C's power and flexibility soon became apparent. Because of this, the Unix operating system which was originally written in assembly language, was almost immediately re-written in C ( only the assembly language code needed to "bootstrap" the C code was kept ). During the rest of the 1970's, C spread throughout many colleges and universities because of it's close ties to Unix and the availability of C compilers. Soon, many different organizations began using their own versions of C causing compatibility problems. In response to this in 1983, the American National Standards Institute ( ANSI ) formed a committee to establish a standard definition of C which became known as ANSI Standard C. Today C is in widespread use with a rich standard library of functions.

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