Submitted by:

Group no.04

History of

Submitted to:
Prof. srinivasan Iyer
GROUP MEMBERS ROLL NO.
1. Bhatia Gulshan 10
2. Phetwani Harsha 14
3. Idnani Manish 22
4. Lachhani Sanjay 30
5. Verma Pooja 48
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We am really thankful to Prof. Srinivasan Iyer for
giving us the opportunity to explore our talent.
We have got great wealth of knowledge in
completing this project. Knowing the information
on various topics has broadened our knowledge
regarding it which was tilled now left unexplored.
We give you a special thanks and expect many such
knowledge-worthy and informative projects in
future.
INTRODUCTION TO
» C is a powerful, flexible language that provides fast program
execution and imposes few constraints on the programmer.
» It allows low level access to information and commands while
retaining the portability and syntax of a high level language.
» These qualities make it a useful language for both systems
programming and general purpose programs.
» C's power and fast program execution come from it's ability to
access low level commands.
» By using C as an intermediate language, it is not necessary to
develop machine-specific code generators. Some compilers which
use C this way are BitC, Gambit, the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, &
Squeak.
» The main area this shows up is in C's lack of type checking.
This can be a powerful advantage to an experienced
programmer but a dangerous disadvantage to a novice.
» Another strong point of C is it's use of modularity. This
concept of modularity also helps with C's portability and
execution speed.
» The C programming language uses libraries as its primary
method of extension. In C, a library is a set of functions
contained within a single "archive" file.
» Sections of code can be stored in libraries for re-use in
future programs.
HISTORY OF
» “C” is a general-purpose computer programming language developed
in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the AT & T Bell Lab to use with the Unix
operating system.
» While working at Bell Labs, Ken Thompson took the process further
by developing the “B” language.
» B was a scaled down version of BCPL written specifically for use in
systems programming.
» Finally in 1972, a co-worker of Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie,
returned some of the generality found in BCPL to the “B” language in
the process of developing the language we now know as “C”.
» Many of its principles and ideas were taken from the earlier language
“B” and B's earlier ancestors BCPL and CPL(Combined Programming
Language).
» “C” was designed for implementing system software.
» It is also widely used for developing portable application
software.
» Many different organizations began to use their own
versions of C programming causing compatibility
problems.
» C's power and flexibility became apparent & because of
this, the Unix operating system which was originally
written in assembly language, was almost immediately re-
written in C.
» During the rest of the 1970's, C spread throughout many
colleges and universities because of it's close ties to Unix
and the availability of C compilers.
EARLY DEVELOPMENTS
» According to Dennis Ritchie, the initial development of “C”
occurred at AT&T Bell Labs between 1969 and 1973 but the most
creative period occurred was 1972.
» The origin of C is closely tied to the development of the Unix
operating system, which was originally implemented in
assembly language on a PDP-7 by Ritchie and Thompson.
» After incorporating several ideas from colleagues. Eventually
they decided to port the operating system to a PDP-11.
» B's lack of functionality to take advantage of some of the PDP-
11's features, notably byte addressability, led to the development
of an early version of the C programming language.
» C language had become powerful enough that most of the
Unix kernel was rewritten in C.
» This was one of the first operating system kernels
implemented in a language other than assembly.
K&R “C”
» In 1978, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie published the first
edition of The C Programming Language.
» This book was known as C programmers as "K&R“.
» This 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.
» The second edition which was published in1989 covers the later
ANSI “C” standard.
» Even after the publication of C standard, for many years K&R C
was still considered the "lowest common denominator“
» But C programmers restricted themselves when maximum
portability was desired.
» K&R introduced several language features :-
 standard I/O library
 long integers data type
 unsigned integers data type
 compound assignment operators =op were changed to

op= to remove the semantic ambiguity created by the

construct i=-10, which had been interpreted as i =- 10
instead of the possibly intended i = -10
ANSI “C” & ISO “C”
» During the late 1970s and 1980s, versions of C were
implemented for a wide variety of mainframe computers,
minicomputers, and microcomputers, including the IBM
PC, as its popularity began to increase significantly.
» In 1983, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI)
formed a committee, X3J11, to establish a standard
specification of C.
» In 1989, the standard was ratified as ANSI X3.159-1989
"Programming Language C." This version of the language is
often referred to as ANSI C, Standard C, or sometimes C89.
» In 1990, the ANSI C standard with formatting changes was
adopted by the “International Organization for
Standardization” (ISO) as ISO/IEC 9899:1990, which is
sometimes called C90.
» The standards committee also included several additional
features such as function prototypes , void pointers,
support for international character sets and locales, and
preprocessor enhancements.
C99
After the ANSI/ISO standardization process, the C language
specification remained relatively static for some time.
The C standard was further revised in the late 1990s, leading to
the publication of ISO/IEC 9899:1999 in 1999, which is
commonly referred to as "C99.“
C99 introduced several new features, including inline
functions, several new data types (including long integers and a
complex type to represent complex numbers), variable-length
arrays, support for variadic macros (macros of variable) and
support for one-line comments beginning with //.
GCC, Sun Studio and other C compilers now support many or
all of the new features of C99.