History Of C

'C' seems a strange name for a programming language. But this strange sounding language is one of the most popular computer languages today because it is a structured, high-level. machine independ­ent language. It allows software developers to develop programs without worrying about the hard­ware platforms where they will be implemented.

The root of all modern languages is ALGOL, introduced in the early 1960s. ALGOL was the first computer language to use a block structure. Although it never became popular in USA, it was widely used in Europe. ALGOL gave the concept of structured programming to the computer science com­munity. Computer scientists like Corrado Bohm, Guiseppe Jacopini and Edsger Dijkstra popularized this concept during 1960s. Subsequently. several languages were announced.

In 1967, Martin Richards developed a language called BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language) primarily for writing system software. In 1970, Ken Thompson created a language using many features of BCPL and called it simply B. B was used to create early versions of UNIX operat­ing system at Bell Laboratories. Both BCPL and B were "typeless" system programming languages.

C was evolved from ALGOL, BCPL and B by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Laboratories in 1972. C uses many concepts from these languages and added the concept of data types and other powerful features. Since it was developed along with the UNIX operating system, it is strongly associated with UNIX. This operating system, which was also developed at Bell Laboratories, was coded almost entirely in C. UNIX is one of the most popular network operating systems in use today and the heart of the Internet data superhighway.

For many years. C was used mainly in academic environments, but eventually with the release of many C compilers for commercial use and the increasing popularity of UNIX, it began to gain wide­spread support among computer professionals. Today, C is running under a variety of operating sys­tem and hardware platforms.

During 1970s, C had evolved into what is now known as ^-traditional C". The language became more popular after publication of the book 'The C Programming Language' by Brian Kerningham and Dennis Ritchie in 1978. The book was so popular that the language came to be known as "K&R C among the programming community. The rapid growth of C led to the development of different versions of the language that were similar but often incompatible. This posed a serious problem for system developers.