The C programming language 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.
Facts about C
- C was invented to write an operating system called UNIX.
- C is a successor of B language, which was introduced around 1970.
- The language was formalized in 1988 by the American National Standard Institute(ANSI).
- The UNIX OS was totally written in C by 1973.
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 anyother text editor to write your C program into a file.
The C Compiler
The source code written in source file is the human readable source for your program. It needs to be "compiled", to turn into machine language so that your CPU can actually execute the program as per instructions given.