C/introduction Tutorial

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C is a 3rd generation HIGH LEVEL PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE.
It was designed and written by Dennis M. Ritchie, employee of AT & T's Bell Laboratories of USA, in 1972.
C is one of the simplest and easy to learn programming language.

History

If we talking about the history of C, we see that there is a long journey from starting of C to latest C which are used frequently.
Following flowchart show the step by step development of C.

BCPL - developed by Martin Richards
B - written by Ken Thompson in 1970
C - publication of 'The C Programming Language' by Kernighan & Ritchie in 1978
ANSI C /ISO C - standard definition of C given by American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in 1988.

So, in today's scenerio, we use ANSI C.

Some important facts about C

C was invented during development of an operating system called UNIX.
The language was standarized in 1988 by the American National Standard Institute (ANSI).
The UNIX OS and LINUX OS were totally written in C.
Today C is the most widely used System Programming Language.
Most of the state-of-the-art software and also some gaming frameworks have been implemented using C.
Today's most popular RDBMS MySQL has been written in C.

Example

A C program basically consists of the following parts −

       Preprocessor Commands
       Functions
       Variables
       Statements & Expressions
       Comments

Let us look at a simple code that would print the words "Hello World" −

/* my first program in C */ //(Comments- Not compile by compiler)

#include <stdio.h> //(Preprocessor commands)

int main() //(Globally declared function called main function)

{ //(Starting of body of main function)

printf("Hello, World! \n"); //(Print or display function)

return 0; //(Returing values, here nothing will returned so return 0)

}//(End of main function)

Output: