Description
What Is The C Language?
C Programming is one of the most useful and easy to use computer programming languages. The person who came up with this C Programming went by the name of Dennis M. Ritchie, and he worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories. At the time, precisely in 1972, C Programming was meant to help in improving the now widely used UNIX operating system, whose development had begun in 1969. And did it? Yes, it did. Its kernel code now began to use fewer lines than it did before when it used the assembly programming language, which is commonly abbreviated as asm.
That does not mean that the C language is restricted to only a few lines. It can actually take as few as three lines or as many as millions of them. At the same time, it is written in a single text file or a number of them, the text files bearing the extension, ‘c’, as in, hello.c.
As for its introduction to the market, the C programming language was not available to the public until 1978 when Ritchie joined hands with Brian Kernighan to produce the first set for commercial use. That is where the now common term, K & R standard, was derived from – Kernighan and Ritchie. It is important to point out that the C programming language was officially formalized by the American National Standard Institute, abbreviated as ANSI, in 1988.
Other Early Projects Improved By C
Oracle
UNIX was not the only project to be made more efficient by the C Language. The Oracle database also benefitted when, in 1983, its initial code that had been written in asm was re-written in the C language. The development of the Oracle database had begun in 1977.
Windows 1.0
Windows 1.0, which was released in 1985, is said to be partially written in C and partially in assembly or asm. The source code is, however, not available to the public.
The Linus kernel
The Linux kernel, which was released in 1992 as a composite part of the GNU operating system, and whose development began in 1991, also uses the C Language. Although some of GNU’s components use Lisp programming languages, it still has others that use the C programming language. Incidentally, any idea what GNU represents? Well, apparently, IT is not all serious stuff without fun – GNU is … Wait for it… ‘GNU’s Not Unix’ – some artistic thinking there.
Anyway, for practical purposes, C language is more procedural than anything else and can be used for different operating systems. It is actually the most used so far worldwide, though it faces great competition from Java, another popular programming language.
Who uses the C Programming Language today?
The C Programming language is mostly used by software developers or programmers and particularly those using the operating system, UNIX, C compiler, and virtually every application program of UNIX. Suffice it to say, the C programming language is today the most used professional language in the world of computers.