OVERVIEW OF C

'C' seems a strange name for a programming language. In 1972 C was developed from ALGOL, BCPL and B by Dennis Ritchie at the BELL Laboratories. But this strange sounding language is one of the most popular computer languages today because of its structure, high- level and machine in dependency. C is a powerful, flexible, portable and elegantly structured programming language. Since C combines the features of high- level language with the elements of the assembler , it is suitable for both systems and application programming. It is undoubtedly the most general purpose language today in OS's and embedded system development.

The increasing popularity of C is probably due to its many desirable qualities. It is a robust language whose rich set of built- in functions and operators can be used to write any complex program. Programs written in C are efficient and fast. It is a couple of times faster than BASIC.

A C program is basically a collection of functions that are supported by the c library. We can continuously add our own functions to C library. With the availability of a large number of functions, the programming task becomes simple.