C Programming Language History, Importance And Standards

A very brief c programming language history for those interested to know when, where and by whom c language was developed and came into existence is given below.

Brief C Programming Language History

In 1972, Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Laboratories of USA developed C from ALGOL, BCPL and B using many concepts from these languages while adding many new powerful features and concepts. Also, since C programming language was used to code and develop the UNIX operating system(also developed at the Bell Laboratories), therefore C is closely associated with UNIX.

C Language Importance

C being an efficient, reliable, simple, structured and much lower level level machine independent powerful computer programming language can be used by software developers to develop programs and software without worrying about the hardware platforms where they will be implemented. It can be used to write high-performance code for both application and system software.

Thus, C is best suited where speed, space, and portability are important. Most of the operating systems and game software are also written in C.

C Standards aka Versions

In 1989, with the aim of standardizing the C language, the standardizing committee of the American National Standards Institute(ANSI) standardized C in USA which is now known as ANSI C. Later on, in 1990, through the efforts of the International Standards Organization(ISO) it was approved worldwide. We call this Standard C or C89.

In 1999, the C standard was revised further, known as C99(ISO/IEC 9899:1999) which was the result of the belief that if certain new features will be added to C will enhance its usefulness.
Some of the features introduced in C99 standard are as follows:

• New data types(long long int, and a complex type for representing complex numbers)
• Inline functions
• Improved support for IEEE 754 floating point representation
• Variable length arrays

The latest C standard is C11(ISO/IEC 9899:2011) formerly named C1X mainly standardizes features that have already been supported by common contemporary compilers, and includes a detailed memory model to better support multiple threading.