Introduction to c language

Introduction to c

C is a programming language that lets us give a computer very specific commands. C was invented in 1972. It's one of the oldest languages to be used even today! It is one of the most widely used programming languages in the world. It has influenced many popular languages, especially c++. But why do we still use such an old programming language? why not something newer and easier to understand,like python?

Let's find out.

History of C Language

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

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

Dennis Ritchie is known as the founder of the 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.

 

Features of c

Simple: C is a structure based language i.e we can divide a big program into multiple parts, which makes it easy to write and understand.

 Efficient and Fast

• programs written in c are efficient and fast.
• This is the most critical factor for using c over other languages.
• c is considered to be "close to the computer ," meaning we can program the computer to do precisely what we want.

Portable: Programs written in C can be run on different types of machines with little or no modifications.  

Memory Management : It allows you to allocate memory at the runtime, that is, it supports the concept of dynamic memory allocation.

Dynamic Memory Allocation- When you are not sure about the memory requirements in your program and want to specify it at the run time, that is, when you run your program, you can do it manually.

Pointers : C language provides a pointer that stores the memory address as its value. Pointers are useful in storing and accessing data from memory. We will study this in detail in our upcoming tutorials.

Case Sensitive : It is pretty clear that lowercase and uppercase characters are treated differently in C. It means that if you write “program” and “Program”, both of them would connote different meanings in C. The ‘p’ in “program” is in lowercase format whereas, the ‘P’ in Program is in uppercase formate.

 Compiler  Based : C is a compiler based language, that is, to execute a code we first need to compile it.Structure Oriented/Modular – C is a structured programming language. This means you can divide your code and task within a function to make it interactive. These functions also help in code reusability.