Introduction to C language
History of C ProgrammingLanguage
• The C programming language was developed by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Laboratories in the
early1970s
• Influenced by following previous High levellanguages
o ALGOL60(1960),
o CPL (Cambridge,1963),
o BCPL (Martin Richard, 1967), (Basic Combined ProgrammingLanguage)
o B (Ken Thompson,1970)
o B language is modified by Ritchie and new Language is named as C
• C is a general-purpose language which has been closely associated with the UNIX OS for
which it was developed - since the system and most of the programs are written inC.
C Standards
• Standardized in 1989 by ANSI (American National Standards Institute) known as
ANSIC
• International standard (ISO) in 1990 which was adopted by ANSI and is known asC89
, Characteristics of C Programming languages
• C is a structured programming language
• Provides various operators, such as arithmetic, increment, decrement & relational
• Helps to develop efficient programs & system software
• Can be compiled & executed on any computer
• Allows manipulation of internal processor registries
• Provides various data types
• Allows use of pointers for memory, array, structure & functions
• Provides high level constructs
• Allows programmers to use function calls
Steps for Learning Programming Languages
• 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.
• So, a computer program is just a collection of the instructions necessary to
solve a specific problem.
• The basic operations of a computer system form what is known as the
computer’s instruction set.
• And the approach or method that is used to solve the problem is known as
an algorithm.
Character
Tokens Statements Program
Set
Character Set
• Set of characters are used in writing C program
• Following are the set of characters used
o Alphabets
o Digits
o Special characters
o Whitespaces
• The entire set of characters is listed in below table
History of C ProgrammingLanguage
• The C programming language was developed by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Laboratories in the
early1970s
• Influenced by following previous High levellanguages
o ALGOL60(1960),
o CPL (Cambridge,1963),
o BCPL (Martin Richard, 1967), (Basic Combined ProgrammingLanguage)
o B (Ken Thompson,1970)
o B language is modified by Ritchie and new Language is named as C
• C is a general-purpose language which has been closely associated with the UNIX OS for
which it was developed - since the system and most of the programs are written inC.
C Standards
• Standardized in 1989 by ANSI (American National Standards Institute) known as
ANSIC
• International standard (ISO) in 1990 which was adopted by ANSI and is known asC89
, Characteristics of C Programming languages
• C is a structured programming language
• Provides various operators, such as arithmetic, increment, decrement & relational
• Helps to develop efficient programs & system software
• Can be compiled & executed on any computer
• Allows manipulation of internal processor registries
• Provides various data types
• Allows use of pointers for memory, array, structure & functions
• Provides high level constructs
• Allows programmers to use function calls
Steps for Learning Programming Languages
• 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.
• So, a computer program is just a collection of the instructions necessary to
solve a specific problem.
• The basic operations of a computer system form what is known as the
computer’s instruction set.
• And the approach or method that is used to solve the problem is known as
an algorithm.
Character
Tokens Statements Program
Set
Character Set
• Set of characters are used in writing C program
• Following are the set of characters used
o Alphabets
o Digits
o Special characters
o Whitespaces
• The entire set of characters is listed in below table
