Introduction to C Programming

The C programming language is a popular and widely used programming language for creating computer programs. Dennis Ritchie at AT & T Bell Laboratories of USA in 1972 developed the C language three decades ago.

Though it was designed originally as a language to be used with UNIX operating system, the C language is a general-purpose language. It is an efficient, flexible and portable language. Portability refers to the case in which a unit of software written on one computer may be moved to another computer without any or little modification. C has a wide diversity of operators and commands. C can be effectively utilized for development of system software like, operating systems, compilers, text processors, and database management systems. C is well suited for developing applications programs too.

In the late seventies C began to replace the more familiar languages of that time like PL/I, ALGOL, etc. No one pushed C. It wasn’t made the ‘official’ Bell Labs language. Thus, without any advertisement C’s reputation spread and its pool of users grew. Ritchie seems to have been rather surprised that so many programmers preferred C to older languages like FORTRAN or PL/I, or the newer ones like Pascal and APL. But, that's what happened.

Communicating with a computer involves speaking the language the computer understands, which immediately rules out English as the language of communication with computer. However, there is a close analogy between learning English language and learning C language. 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.