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 a wide range of 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.
