Brief History of C Programming Language |History of C Language

It is good to learn about the history of C programming. C was developed and written by Dennis M. Ritchie in the year 1972 at AT&T Bell Labs, and hence he is known as the founder of C.

Dennis Ritchie

C is a general-purpose programming language which features economy of expression, modern control flow and data structures, and a rich set of operators.

C is not a "very high level" language, nor a "big" one, and is not specialized to any particular area of application. But its absence of restrictions and its generality make it more convenient and effective for many tasks than supposedly more powerful languages.

The history of C programming language is quite interesting. C was originally designed for and implemented on the UNIX operating system on the DEC PDP-ll, by Dennis M. Ritchie.

C is the result of a development process that started with an older language called BCPL. BCPL was developed by Martin Richards, and it influenced a language called B, which was invented by Ken Thompson. B led to the development of C in the 1970s.

For many years, the de facto standard for C was the version supplied with the UNIX operating system. In the summer of 1983 a committee was established to create an ANSI (American National Standards Institute) standard that would define the C language. The standardization process took six years (much longer than anyone reasonably expected).

The ANSI C standard was finally adopted in December 1989, with the first copies becoming available in early 1990. The standard was also adopted by ISO (International Standards Organization), and the resulting standard was typically referred to as ANSI/ISO Standard C. In 1995, Amendment 1 to the C standard was adopted, which, among other things, added several new library functions. The 1989 standard for C, along with Amendment 1, became a base document for Standard C++, defining the C subset of C++. The version of C defined by the 1989 standard is commonly referred to as C89.

During the 1990s, a new standard for C was being developed. It was the 1999 standard for C, usually referred to as C99. In general, C99 retained nearly all of the features of C89. The C99 standardization committee focused on two main areas: the addition of several numeric libraries and the development of some special-use, but highly innovative, new features, such as variable-length arrays and the restrictpointer qualifier. These innovations have once again put C at the forefront of computer language development.

C89 is the version of C in widest use, it is currently accepted by all C compilers, and it forms the basis for C++.

Dennis Ritchie

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie

Quick revision

C programming language was developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at bell laboratories of AT&T (American Telephone & Telegraph), located in the U.S.A.
Dennis Ritchie is known as the founder of the c language.
C is not High level Language (HLL) nor Low Level Language (LLL).
It was developed to overcome the problems of previous languages such as B, BCPL, etc.
Initially, C language was developed to be used in UNIX operating system. It inherits many features of previous languages such as B and BCPL.

Here are the lists of programming languages that were developed with or before C:

Programming Language	Development Year
Regional Assembly Language	1951
Autocode	1952
IPL (forerunner to LISP)	1954
FLOW-MATIC (led by COBOL)	1955
FORTRAN (First compiler)	1957
COMTRAN (precursor to COBOL)	1957
LISP	1958
ALGOL 58	1958
FACT (forerunner to COBOL)	1959
COBOL	1959
RPG	1959
APL	1962
Simula	1962
SNOBOL	1962
CPL (forerunner to C)	1963
Speakeasy (computational environment)	1964
BASIC	1964
PL/I	1964
JOSS	1966
BCPL (forerunner to C)	1967