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# C programming language

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A programming language designed by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie during the early 1970s to be used for operating system implementation and other low-level programming tasks. It was used immediately to reimplement the Unix operating system.

It was called "C" because many features derived from an earlier language named "B", in commemoration of its parent, BCPL. BCPL was in turn descended from an earlier Algol-derived language, CPL.

C became immensely popular outside Bell Labs after about 1980 and is now the dominant language in systems and microcomputer applications programming. It is a staple of the Open Source community. Bjarne Stroustrup and others at Bell Labs worked in the late 1980s to add object-oriented programming language constructs to C, creating a language called C++ (thus avoiding the issue of whether the successor to "B" and "C" should be "D" or "P").

The programming language C has been standardised in the form of an ISO standard. It is standard number ISO 9899. The first ISO edition of this document was published in 1990 (ISO 9899:1990) and was itself a minor modification of a slightly earlier ANSI standard (number anyone?). Subsequent editions have been made, some of which have been largely ignored; As of 2001 the most recent edition is ISO 9899:1999 which was known when it was in draft stage as C9X?.

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Last edited August 4, 2001 4:17 pm (diff)
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