It is good to learn about the history of C programming. C was developed and written by Dennis M. Ritchie in the year 1972, and hence he is known as the founder of C.
C programming language was developed to overcome the difficulties found in older programming languages such as BCPL, BASIC, B, etc.
History of Programming Languages and C
Here are the lists of programming languages that were developed with or before C:
| Programming Language | Development Year |
|---|---|
| Regional Assembly Language | 1951 |
| Autocode | 1952 |
| IPL (forerunner to LISP) | 1954 |
| FLOW-MATIC (led by COBOL) | 1955 |
| FORTRAN (First compiler) | 1957 |
| COMTRAN (precursor to COBOL) | 1957 |
| LISP | 1958 |
| ALGOL 58 | 1958 |
| FACT (forerunner to COBOL) | 1959 |
| COBOL | 1959 |
| RPG | 1959 |
| APL | 1962 |
| Simula | 1962 |
| SNOBOL | 1962 |
| CPL (forerunner to C) | 1963 |
| Speakeasy (computational environment) | 1964 |
| BASIC | 1964 |
| PL/I | 1964 |
| JOSS | 1966 |
| BCPL (forerunner to C) | 1967 |
C is an imperative language designed to compile relatively straightforwardly, which provides low-level memory access. With the gradual increase in the program's popularity, the language and its compiler have become available on many platforms, from embedded microcontrollers to supercomputers.
With the introduction of the K&R C language (a new edition of C published in 1978 by Brian Kernighan and Denis Ritchie), several features have been included in the C language.
Some of these features are:
- Standard I/O (Input/Output) Library
- long int - data type
- unsigned int - data type
- Compound assignment operators
During the late 1980s, C was started to use for various mainframe computers, micro, and minicomputers, which began to get famous. Gradually C got its superset - i.e., C++, which has added features, but it's developed from C with all its initial concepts.
