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One of the most widely recognised [ProgrammingLanguage]s in the world.

It was designed by DennisRitchie at [BellLabs]/[AT&T] (along with other famous people such as KenThompson and BrianKernighan) as the systems ProgrammingLanguage to write their portable [Unix] OperatingSystem in. It was originally derived from [BCPL] but evolved radically. [C] is a great systems ProgrammingLanguage, but blamed for many problems with applications which many complain it is unsuited for.

The original version of [C] made many assumptions and led to [Lint] being written to check whether these assumptions were likely to be unsafe. Many of these assumptions were removed by the [ANSI] [C] standard and the remainder of [Lint]'s job merged into that of the [Compiler]s.

From fortune(6):

* C, n.::
      A ProgrammingLanguage that is sort of like [Pascal] except more like AssemblyLanguage except that it isn't very much like either one, or anything else. It is either the best language available to the art today, or it isn't.

      -- Ray Simard

* "The C Programming Language -- A language which combines the flexibility of AssemblyLanguage with the power of AssemblyLanguage."

[C] has inspired an entire class of languages, including [C++] which some say fixes many problems with [C], while others debate is just a horrible mess. [Java] has decended from [C++] as a portable language with clean ObjectOrientation, itself in turn the inspiration for MicrosoftCorporation's new language called [CSharp].

See the [C History | http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html].

I recommend you learn [C], and use it for writing OperatingSystem~s, and understanding how things actually are implemented, but then code in some other ProgrammingLanguage if you are going to write applications, especially networking programs.

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The following example is a program to approximate the value of pi. Compile it with <tt>gcc -traditional-cpp -o pi pi.c</tt>. If you want a better approximation, increase the program's source code area. <tt>:)</tt>

<verbatim>
/*
 * Program to compute an approximation of pi
 * by Brian Westley, 1988
 */

#define _ -F<00||--F-OO--;
int F=00,OO=00;
main(){F_OO();printf("%1.3f\n",4.*-F/OO/OO);}F_OO()
{
            _-_-_-_
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}
</verbatim>

(As seen in JargonFile:Obfuscated-C-Contest)

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Various snippets of information about [C] in the wiki:
* CastingPointerToFunction

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__Standardization__

The first official standard for the language was “ANSI X3.159-1989” or [ANSI C|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_C], also known as “C89” because it was completed in 1989.

This standard was picked up by [ISO] the following year as ISO/IEC 9899:1990, also known as “C90”.

In 1999, a revised standard, ISO/IEC 9899:1999, a.k.a. [C99|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C99], was ratified. A decade later, I don’t think any widely-available compiler yet fully supports all its features, though [GCC] comes close.

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CategoryProgrammingLanguages, CategoryImperativeProgrammingLanguages, CategoryMachineOrientedProgrammingLanguages, CategorySystemsProgrammingLanguages
112 pages link to C:
Last edited on Monday, June 1, 2009 7:19:54 pm by LawrenceDoliveiro
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