1995, 2001 David Benn1A Tour of CIntroduction• Designed and implemented by Dennis Ritchie for the Unix operating system (DEC-PDP-11) in 1972.• Derived from BCPL (M. Richards, 1967) and B (K. Thompson, 1970). AmigaDOS usedformer.• The C Programming Language by K&R published in 1978.• Ported to a wide variety of platforms since then.• ANSI standardisation started in 1983; standard approved in 1989.• ANSI C standard recently embellished further.• ANSI C is not a strict subset of C++, but that's almost the case.• The C language includes no I/O functions. These are provided by libraries. Languageprovides abstractions of control and data.• There are three aspects to learning C: the language itself, the code libraries available forthe platform (e.g. the Standard C Library), and the C preprocessor.• C is used for a diverse range of programming:1. Operating systems (e.g. Unix, smart cards, etc);2. Device drivers;3. Compilers;4. Numerical computations (where once Fortran might have been used);5. Communications protocol stacks;6. Arbitrary applications.The C Language• C embodies features which are common to all imperative/procedural languages (eg.Pascal, Fortran, BASIC). 1 These are fairly generic C notes, originally serving as an introduction to C for a UnixNetwork Programming class I tutored several years ago. It has been updated a littlesince then, and since the talk I gave on 10 April 2001 to the SA PIC ...
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