C

Chapter 1

Introduction to C

Before getting into the details of C language, this chapter presents, in brief, its history, evolution, strengths, and weaknesses. Then, we’ll discuss some basic concepts that we’ll need in order to write our first program.

History of C

The C language was developed at Bell Laboratories in the early 1970s by Dennis Richie and others. At that time, the UNIX operating system, also developed at Bell Labs, was written in assembly language. Programs written in assembly are usually hard to debug, maintain, and enhance, and UNIX was no exception. Richie decided to rewrite UNIX’s code in another language that would make the execution of these tasks easier. He named the language C because it was the evolution of an earlier ...