C Introduction

C programming was developed by Dennis M. Ritchie in 1972 at Bell Laboratories to develop the UNIX operating system and to develop system applications such as kernels, drivers, etc. C is a general-purpose and procedural programming language. C is known as the mother of programming languages. It is also used to develop modern software programmers.

History of Programming and Programming Languages

A computer can understand only the native binary code that is, zeros and ones. All the data and instructions must be provided to the computer in 0’s and 1’s and it is called machine language. In the olden days, digital electronic computers were programmed in binary code with the help of plugin-boards or punched cards. Behind time programs were written as a sequences of hexadecimal numbers with the occurrence of terminals with keyboards and monitors. Each hexadecimal digit represents a four binary digit sequence and programs are complex to develop.

Later on, Assembly languages were developed to express operations more symbolic. Programs that are written in Assembly languages are translated to machine code using the assembler program. Assembly languages were unsuited to large-scale programming and each processor provides its own assembler dialect. The programs written in Assembly languages are non-portable because a program is written in one machine, that won’t run on another machine so, we want to rewrite the program to run on another machine.

Between 1950 and 60, high-level languages were introduced. Unlike assembler, high-level languages is portable with different machines, and the programs written in high-level languages run without any changes. To execute programs, the code is converted to machine code by the compiler.

There are two ways to run high-level programs. One is Compiler and the other is Interpreter, eg: Python, Matlab are compiled using interpreter.

Applications of C Programming

• Developing system applications
• Embedded system
• Application by Adobe are developed using C programming language
• Design GUI application
• Develop databases
• Design operating system
• Design network devices
• Google chromium browser developed using C/C++

Need to learn c language

If we learn C programming first then we can learn any modern programming languages and it will help us to understand the underlying architecture of OS. Some key advantages of learning C are,

• C is a Middle-Level Language
• Embedded Programming
• C is a Structured Language
• C can handle low-level activities
• C is considered as the mother language for modern programming languages

Hello World using C

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main()
{
    printf("Hello world!\n");
    return 0;
}

Output

Hello world!