The C Language
In the early 1970s, Dennis Ritchie of Bell Laboratories was working on a project to develop the Unix operating system. (An operating system is a set of programs that manages a computer’s resources and handles its interactions with users. For example, it’s the operating system that puts the system prompt onscreen for a terminal-style interface that manages the windows and mice for graphical interfaces and that runs programs for you.) For this work Ritchie needed a language that was concise, that produced compact, fast programs, and that could control hardware efficiently.
Traditionally, programmers met these needs by using assembly language, which is closely tied to a computer’s internal machine language. However, assembly language ...
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