History Of C Language

                History of C Language

Computer performs certain tasks as per instructions given to it by the user. A program is a sequence of instructions that computer can interpret and execute. Earlier programs were written in machine code or assembly code. But these programs were very complex and difficult to write and anderstand. So high level programming languages evolved. The programs written in these languages were relatively easy to understand. The C language is one of the most popular high level programming Language

The C language was developed by Dennis Ritchie at AT & T Bell laboratories, USA in 1972 for use with Unix operating system. Like most programming languages, C is derived from ALGOL (ALGOrithmic Language), the first language to use a block structure which was introduced in early 1960's. Ahhough it was widely accepted in Europe but never gained wide acceptance in the United States.

 Several obscure languages preceded the development of C language. In 1967, Martin Richards developed a language called BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language). In 1970, Ken Thompson developed a language called B using many features of BCPL. B language was used to develop the early
versions of Unix operating system, one of the popular network operating systems in use today. Finally in 1972. Dennis Ritchie developed a C language using many concepts from ALGOL, BCPL, B and added the concepts of data types. 

After introduction of "Traditional C" language by Dennis Ritchie in 1972, it was confined to use within Bell Laboratories until 1978, when the book "The C Programming Language" was published by Brain Kernighan and Ritchie. The book became so popular that the language at that time was known as "K&RC"

The rapid growth and popularity of C led to the development of different versions of C which were similar but often incompatible. To avoid incompatibilities and problems to system developers due to them, in 1983, the ANSI (American National Standards Institute) worked on the standardized defini tion of C language. It was approved in 1989 and this version of C language was known as ANSI C. In 1990, the ANSI C standards were adopted by ISO (International Standardization Organization) with a few modifications. This version of C was referred to as C89. A much more significant update was made in 1999. This version of C was known as C99 which is the current version of C language. The history and development of C language is as shown in the image below     ↓↓↓↓↓

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