History of C language

C language was developed in the 1970 by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Telephone at Bell Telephone Laboratories,Inc(called AT&T Bell Laboratories). Until 1978 C was mostly used within the Bell laboratories. In 1978 Brain Kernighan and Ritchie published a definitive description of the language referred to as K & R version of C.
After the publication of the K&R description many desirable features of C impressed computer professionals.By the mind of 1980 the popularity of C had become widespread. Numerous C compilers and interpreters had been written for different Operating systems.Most of the commercial implementations of C were some what different from K & T version of C. This created some minor incompatibilities among different implementations of the language. Therefore, the ANSI (American National Standard Institute) worked on a standard version of C language.

Characteristics of C language
The following are the features of C language:

• C is an All purpose programming language.It is equally suitable for generating high level application and low level application.

• C language encourages the users to write their own library function so that they can extend the features of the language.

• C program can be executed on any type of computers.

• The program written in C language can be converted into machine language more efficiently.

• Computer games can be generated in C language which is accomplished through the usage of sound graphics.

• C is close to hardware.

• Both low and high level programming can be done in C language.

• Another feature of C language is the address manipulation which can be done through the usage of pointers.