Before You try to learn and understand C Programming Language, first you should know What is C Language or What is C Programming Language. This Tutorial is for you if you looking to figure out about C Programming Language, what is it and a brief history about C programming language.
C is a widely used general-purpose, imperative(procedural), computer programming language. C Language was developed by Dennis M. Ritchie at AT & T Bell Labs between 1969 to 1973 and used to re-implement the Unix Operating System. C Language first appeared in 1972. C Language has been standardized by the ANSI(American National Standards Institute) and (ISO)International Organization for Standardization.
History and Development of C
The Credit for the development of C language also goes to Unix Operating System. Unix Operating System was developed by Ken Thompson at AT & T Bell Labs, which ran on the PDP-7 (an early minicomputer with only 8K words of main memory). Like other Operating Systems of the time, UNIX was written in assembly language. Programs Written in assembly language are usually painful to debug and hard to enhance.
Ken Thompson Decided that a higher-level language was needed for the further development of UNIX Operating System, so he designed a language named B. Then Dennis Ritchie Joined the UNIX Project at Bell Labs and began programming in B. In 1970, Bell laboratories accuried a PDP-11 for the UNIX Project. In 1971, It Became apparent that B was not well-suited to the PDP-11, so Ritchie began to develop an extended version of B. First he Called his language NB("New B") but latter name changed to C.
The language was stable ennough by 1973 that UNIX could be rewritten in C Language. During the 1970s, there were relatively few C programmers, and most of them were UNIX users. In 1980s C has expended beyond the UNIX world. C Compilers became avialable on a variety of machines running under different operating systems.
C Standards
The Development of a U.S. standard for C began in 1983 under the auspices of the American National Standards Institute(ANSI). The Standard was completed in 1988 and approved in December 1989 as ANSI standard X3.159-1989. In 1990, it was approved by ISO as international standard ISO/IEC 9899:1990. This version of the language is usually referred as C89 or C90, to distinguish it from the original version of C, often called K&R C.
The language goes through few changes in 1995, more changes occurred with publication of a new standard, ISO/IEC 9899:1999 in 1999 known as C99.In 2007, work began on another revision of the C standard, informally called "C1X" until its official publication on 2011-12-08. The C standards committee adopted guidelines to limit the adoption of new features that had not been tested by existing implementations.