History of C Language

It will give you a brief information about the History of C language in perspective of different authors

1. History of C language By- Vishweshwar Manaw To- DR. Rajeshwari Trivedi ( Cordinator – B.Sc. IT)

2. algol >> bcpl >> b >> c ALGOL was the first Programming Language to use a block structure made the basis of Modern Languages as it gave the concept of Structured Programming. BCPL was developed by the Martin Richards in 1967 highly influenced the B language which was developed by Ken Thompson in 1970 at Bell Labarotries for the first Unix System. FACT : BCPL and B are “type less” languages.

3. C was originally developed for writing the UNIX operating system for the DEC PDP-7 Super-computer. UNIX was written first in language FORTRAN & B where B was used mostly but B did not support Data Structures and data types were also expressed in Machine language. So, Ritchie along with his colleagues developed C during 1971-73 for writing the UNIX. UNIX was rewritten in the C, even UNIX Kernel was also rewritten in C in 1973 on DEC PDP-11.

4. Dennis Ritchie & Brian Kernighan documented the creation in the form of a book called “The C programming language” . After then C was popularized more and was called as ‘K & R C’ . C came into change when ANSI(American National Standards Institute) formed a committee in 1983 for its standardization and C got its new version ANSI C or C89 in 1989. C was certified by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in 1990 and called as ANSI/ISO C .

5. Overtime C evolved with some new features in 1999 by a Standardization Committee and called as C99 t hough many compilers does not support this version of C . From all apart the contribution of many scientists in the development of C but Dennis Ritchie is considered as the Father because of his approach of developing an Operating System having the features of sharing the common computing resources with multiple users made to the birth of a Robust language C!

6. Some Facts about the Evolution of C language Before the Invention of C Ritchie was involved in a project of MULTICS at Bell labs. MULTICS was an operating system which can allow multiple users but was stopped by the Bell labs due to overweighting of its cost over benefits. UNIX was earlier named as UNICS ( Uniplexed Information and Computing Service) which was taken from MULTICS (Multiplexed Information and Computer Services). Later it changed to UNIX.

7. C programs are written using block structure which it got from ALGOL programming language. ALGOL also gave the concept of Structured Programming . Although Brian Kernighan documented ‘The C Programming Language’ with Dennis Ritchie but he was not directly involved in the design of C. Though he was the author of the famous “Hello World” program and many other UNIX programs.