History of C Language

C programming is a general-purpose, procedure-oriented programming language. It is both machine-independent and structured. C is a high-level programming language developed by Dennis Ritchie in the early 1970s. It is now one of the most popular and influential programming languages worldwide.

C is popular for its simplicity, efficiency, and versatility. It has powerful features including low-level memory access, a rich set of operators, and a modular framework.

Apart from its importance with respect to the evolution of computer programming technologies, the design of C language has a profound influence on most of the other programming languages that are in use today. The languages that are influenced by C include Java, PHP, JavaScript, C#, Python and many more. These languages have designed their syntax, control structures and other basic features from C.

C supports different hardware and operating systems due to its portability. Generally, it is considered as a basic language and influenced many other computer languages. It is most widely used in academia and industry. C’s relevance and extensive acceptance make it crucial for prospective programmers.

The history of the C programming language is quite fascinating and pivotal in the development of computer science and software engineering.

Year wise development of programming is as follows −

Overview of C Language History

A brief overview of C language history is given below −

Origin of C Programming

‘ALGOL’ was the foundation or progenitor of programming languages. It was first introduced in 1960. ‘ALGOL’ was widely used in European countries. The ALGOL had introduced the concept of structured programming to the developer community. The year 1967 marked the introduction of a novel computer programming language known as ‘BCPL’, an acronym for Basic Combined Programming Language. BCPL was designed by Martin Richards in the mid-1960s.

Dennis Ritchie created C at Bell Laboratories in the early 1970s. It developed from an older language named B that Ken Thompson created. The main purpose of C’s creation was to construct the Unix operating system, which was crucial in the advancement of contemporary computers. BCPL, B, and C all fit firmly in the traditional procedural family typified by Fortran and Algol 60. BCPL, B and C differ syntactically in many details, but broadly they are similar.

Development of C Programming

In 1971, Dennis Ritchie started working on C, and he and other Bell Labs developers kept improving it. The language is appropriate for both system programming and application development because it was made to be straightforward, effective, and portable.

Standardization of C Programming

Dennis Ritchie commenced development on C in 1971 and, in collaboration with other developers at Bell Labs, proceeded to refine it. The language was developed with portability, simplicity, and efficiency in mind, rendering it applicable to both application and system programming.

History of C Versions After Traditional C

K&R C

Dennis Ritchie along with Brian Kernighan published the first edition of their book “The C Programming Language”. Popularly known as K&R (the initials of its authors), the book served for many years as an informal specification of the language. The version of C that it describes is commonly referred to as “K&R C”. It is also referred to as C78.

Many of the features of C language introduced in K&R C are still the part of the language ratified as late as in 2018. In early versions of C, only functions that return types other than int must be declared if used before the function definition; functions used without prior declaration were presumed to return type int.

C compilers by AT&T and other vendors supported several features added to the K&R C language. Although C started gaining popularity, there was a lack of uniformity in implementation. Therefore, it was felt that the language specifications must be standardized.

ANSI C

In the 1980s, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) began working on a formal standard for the C language. This led to the development of ANSI C, which was standardized in 1989. ANSI C introduced several new features and clarified ambiguities present in earlier versions of the language.

C89/C90

The ANSI C standard was adopted internationally and became known as C89 (or C90, depending on the year of ratification). It served as the basis for compilers and development tools for many years.

C99

In 1999, the ISO/IEC approved an updated version of the C standard known as C99. The C standard was further revised in the late 1990s.

C99 introduced new features, including inline functions, several new data types such as a complex type to represent complex numbers, and variable-length arrays etc. It also added support for C++ style one-line comments beginning with //.

C11

C11, published in 2011, is another major revision of the C standard. The C11 standard adds new features to C and the library and introduced features such as multi-threading support, anonymous structures and unions, and improved Unicode support.

It includes type generic macros, anonymous structures, improved Unicode support, atomic operations, multi-threading, and bounds-checked functions. It has an improved compatibility with C++.

C17

The C17 standard has been published in June 2018. C17 is the current standard for the C programming language. No new features have been introduced with this standard revision. It only performs certain technical corrections, and clarifications to defects in C11.

C18

The most recent version of the C standard, C18, was published in 2018. It includes minor revisions and bug fixes compared to C11.

C23

C23 is the informal name for the next major C language standard revision, expected to be published in 2024. 14 new keywords are expected to be introduced in this revision.

C has remained popular over time because to its simplicity, efficiency, and versatility. It has been used to create a diverse spectrum of software including operating systems, embedded systems, applications, and games. C’s syntax and semantics have also impacted different modern programming languages such as C++, Java, and Python.