C
<language> A programming language designed by
Dennis Ritchie at
AT&T Bell Labs ca. 1972 for systems programming on the
PDP-11 and immediately used to reimplement
Unix.
It was called "C" because many features derived from an earlier compiler named "
B".
In fact, C was briefly named "NB".
B was itself strongly influenced by
BCPL.
Before
Bjarne Stroustrup settled the question by designing
C++, there was a humorous debate over whether C's successor should be named "D" or "P" (following B and C in "BCPL").
C is terse, low-level and permissive.
It has a macro preprocessor,
cpp.
Partly due to its distribution with
Unix, C became immensely popular outside
Bell Labs after about 1980 and is now the dominant language in systems and
microcomputer applications programming.
It has grown popular due to its simplicity, efficiency, and flexibility.
C programs are often easily adapted to new environments.
C is often described, with a mixture of fondness and disdain, as "a language that combines all the elegance and power of
assembly language with all the readability and maintainability of assembly language".
Ritchie's original C, known as
K&R C after Kernighan and Ritchie's book, has been
standardised (and simultaneously modified) as
ANSI C.
See also
ACCU,
ae,
c68,
c386,
C-Interp,
cxref, dbx,
dsp56k-gcc,
dsp56165-gcc,
gc,
GCT,
GNU C,
GNU superoptimiser,
Harvest C,
malloc,
mpl,
Pthreads,
ups.
[
Jargon File]
