C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system.

Although C was designed for implementing system software, it is also widely used for developing portable application software.

C is one of the most popular programming languages. It is widely used on many differentsoftware platforms, and there are few computer architectures for which a C compiler does not exist. C has greatly influenced many other popular programming languages, most notably C++, which originally began as an extension to C.

Like most imperative languages in the ALGOL tradition, C has facilities for structured programming and allows lexical variable scope andrecursion, while a static type system prevents many unintended operations. In C, all executable code is contained within functions. Functionparameters are always passed by value. Pass-by-reference is achieved in C by explicitly passing pointer values. Heterogeneous aggregate data types (struct) allow related data elements to be combined and manipulated as a unit. C program source text is free-format, using the semicolon as a statement terminator (not a delimiter).

C also exhibits the following more specific characteristics:

• non-nestable function definitions
• variables may be hidden in nested blocks
• partially weak typing; for instance, characters can be used as integers
• low-level access to computer memory by converting machine addresses to typed pointers
• function and data pointers supporting ad hoc run-time polymorphism
• array indexing as a secondary notion, defined in terms of pointer arithmetic
• a preprocessor for macro definition, source code file inclusion, and conditional compilation
• complex functionality such as I/O, string manipulation, and mathematical functions consistently delegated to library routines
• A relatively small set of reserved keywords
• A lexical structure that resembles B more than ALGOL, for example
  • { ... } rather than ALGOL's begin ... end
  • the equal-sign is for assignment (copying), much like Fortran
  • two consecutive equal-signs are to test for equality (compare to .EQ. in Fortran or the equal-sign in BASIC)
  • && and || in place of ALGOL's and and or (these are semantically distinct from the bit-wise operators & and | because they will never evaluate the right operand if the result can be determined from the left alone (short-circuit evaluation)).
  • a large number of compound operators, such as +=, ++, etc.

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