Features are as follows:
- Portability: It is a platform-independent language.
- Modularity: Possibility to break down large programs into small modules.
- Flexibility: The possibility of a programmer to control the language.
- Speed: C comes with support for system programming and hence it compiles and executes with high speed when compared with other high-level languages.
- Extensibility: Possibility to add new features by the programmer.
C is a general-purpose and high-level programming language that is ideal for developing portable applications or firmware. Originally intended for writing system software and many UNIX-based operating systems are written in C. C was developed at Bell Labs by Dennis Ritchie for the Unix Operating System in the at AT & T’s Bell Laboratories of USA in 1972.
Communicating with a computer involves speaking the language the computer understands, which immediately rules out English as the language of communication with computer.
The classical method of learning English is to first learn the alphabets used in the language, then learn to combine these alphabets to form words, which in turn are combined to form sentences and sentences are combined to form paragraphs.
Learning C is similar and easier. Instead of straight-away learning how to write programs, we must first know what alphabets, numbers and special symbols are used in C, then how using them constants, variables and keywords are constructed, and finally how are these combined to form an instruction. A group of instructions would be combined later on to form a program.
Popular operating systems written in C
- Windows
- UNIX
- Linux
- Android
- Mac
Notes: DatabasesThe world’s most popular databases, including Oracle Database, MySQL, MS SQL Server, and PostgreSQL, are coded in C (the first three of them actually both in C and C++).
3D movies are created with applications that are generally written in C and C++.
Here are some of the reasons why C is popular today.
- The C programming language is simple to understand. Technically, C is a mid-level language which means that it is in close association with both low-level and high-level languages. The high-level language characteristic makes it easily relatable to the human language with easy English words and phrases.
Fact: Sanskrit is regarded as the most suitable language for programming as each and every word in Sanskrit connotes a logical meaning to the compiler.
- The most important feature of C is the implementation of various data types, loops, arrays, functions, structures, unions, macros, user-defined operations, linked lists, stacks and queues, binary trees, hash tables, and pointers.
- C is a structured (modular) programming language that allows the programmer to break his codes into smaller fragments to improve the readability of the code and hence make the program less redundant and simple.
- The portability feature of C also plays an important role in making it an evergreen language. Who wants to study a language where you cannot use the same piece of code on different platforms? C comes with this unique feature that makes our work much easier. Suppose you are a Windows user but for some apparent reasons you want to switch to Linux. Now, the programs that you have written and executed on let’s say, CodeBlocks will work and give the same output when copied and pasted in a terminal while using LINUX.
- The C standard library provides you a remarkable range of inbuilt functions that eases out things for the programmer.
- The C programming language helps you to manage memory efficiently as it supports the feature of dynamic memory allocation and bit field
As every language contains a set of characters used to construct words, statements, etc., C language also has a set of characters which include alphabets, digits, and special symbols. C language supports a total of 256 characters.
Every C program contains statements. These statements are constructed using words and these words are constructed using characters from C character set. C language character set contains the following set of characters...
- Alphabets
- Digits
- Special Symbols
