Introduction to C

                                                                                                                    
 
C is a structured language and is sometimes referred to as a "high level assembly language". Invented to implement Unix at the Bell Laboratories in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie, C became one the most popular languages to be used by programmers.  The language is not tied to any operating system or machine, and while it has been used as a "system programming language", it can be used equally well to write programs.

Martin Richards developed the language 'BCPL'(Basic Combined Programming Language) at Cambridge University in an attempt to remove the problems being encountered in CPL(Combined Programming Language). In 1970, Ken Thompson attempted to further refine BCPL in his version of the language called 'B'. B was written for the first UNIX system DEC PDP-7. Many of the important ideas in C come from these two languages.

To find out more about the C language please click on the menu bar on the column to your left.
 
 

Last Update: October 2000                                                                                 
Maintained by Ratna Jain