C is a general-purpose, high-level language that was originally developed by Dennis M. Ritchie to develop the UNIX operating system at Bell Labs. C was originally first implemented on the DEC PDP-11 computer in 1972. In 1978, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie produced the first publicly available description of C, now known as the K&R standard. The UNIX operating system, the C compiler, and essentially all UNIX application programs have been written in C. C has now become a widely used professional language for various reasons − Easy to learn Structured language It produces efficient programs It can handle low-level activities It can be compiled on a variety of computer platforms Facts about C C was invented to write an operating system called UNIX. C is a successor of B language which was introduced around the early 1970s. The language was formalized in 1988 by the American National Standard Institute (ANSI). The UNIX OS was totally written in C. Today C is the most widely used and popular System Programming Language. Most of the state-of-the-art software have been implemented using C. Today's most popular Linux OS and RDBMS MySQL have been written in C. Why use C? C was initially used for system development work, particularly the programs that make-up the operating system. C was adopted as a system development language because it produces code that runs nearly as fast as the code written in assembly language. Some examples of the use of C might be − Operating Systems Language Compilers Assemblers Text Editors Print Spoolers Network Drivers Modern Programs Databases Language Interpreters Utilities C Programs A C program can vary from 3 lines to millions of lines and it should be written into one or more text files with extension ".c"; for example, hello.c. You can use "vi", "vim" or any other text editor to write your C program into a file. This tutorial assumes that you know how to edit a text file and how to write source code inside a program file. LESSON LIST C - Environment Setup C - Program Structure C - Basic Syntax C - Data Types C - Variables C - Constants C - Storage Classes C - Operators C - Decision Making C - Loops C - Functions C - Scope Rules C - Arrays C - Pointers C - Strings C - Structures C - Unions C - Bit Fields C - Typedef C - Input & Output C - File I/O C - Preprocessors C - Header Files C - Type Casting C - Error Handling C - Recursion C - Variable Arguments C - Memory Management C - Command Line Arguments
