Posted on September 10th, 2012
2572 views C was developed by DennisRitchie at Bell Laboratories in 1972. Most of its principles and ideaswere taken from the earlier language B, BCPL and CPL. CPL was developed jointly between the Mathematical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge and the University of London Computer Unit in 1960s. CPL(Combined Programming Language) was developed with the purpose ofcreating a language that was capable of both machine independentprogramming and would allow the programmer to control the behavior ofindividual bits of information. But the CPL was too large for use inmany applications. In 1967, BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language)was created as a scaled down version of CPL while still retaining itsbasic features. This process was continued by Ken Thompson. He made BLanguage during working at Bell Labs. B Language was a scaled downversion of BCPL. B Language was written for the systems programming. In1972, a co-worker of Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie developed C Languageby taking some of the generality found in BCPL to the B language. Theoriginal PDP-11 version of the Unix system was developed in assemblylanguage. In 1973, C language had become powerful enough that most ofthe Unix kernel was rewritten in C. This was one of the first operatingsystem kernels implemented in a language other than assembly.
Duringthe rest of the 1970's, C spread throughout many colleges anduniversities because of its close ties to UNIX and the availability of Ccompilers. Soon, many different organizations began using their ownversions of C Language. This was causing great compatibility problems.In 1983, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) formed acommittee to establish a standard definition of C Language. That isknown as ANSI Standard C. Today C is the most widely used SystemProgramming Language. |