Overview, History, Features, Advantages and Disadvantages or C Language

Overview: C is a programming language developed by Denis Ritchie in 1972 at AT&T. In the late 70’s, C began to replace more familiar languages of that time like PL/I, AlGOL, FORTRAN etc. No one was there for promoting and advertising C, but it became official language of Bells Labs. Surprisingly, most of the programmers refer C language because it is simple, reliable and easy to use. At the time, PASCAL was used as pure programming language. PASCAL was used as pure programming language. PASCAL has similar features with C, most programmer shift to C because of robustness and platform independence. Those, who shifted to C, have found this programming language is user friendly and capable to solve user problems.

All the programming languages broadly categorized into two. High Level Languages (HLL) and Low Level Languages (LLL). High Level Languages are designed to give better efficiency, faster development and user-friendly development environment. Low Level languages are designed to give better machine efficiency, faster program execution and low processor overload.C stands in between HLL and LLL. Hence, C language is often called Middle Level Language (MLL). It has relatively good programming efficiency, faster development and user-friendly like HLL and relatively better machine efficiency, faster program execution and low processor overload like LLL. Because of the having features of both, it is capable of developing strong programs, most destructive viruses and even almost all parts of operating system like recoded UNIX in 1973 and Linux in 1991.

History: By 1960 a large number of computer languages had come into existence. Most of these for a specific purpose like COBAL was used for commercial purposes, ALGOL was use for algorithmic conversion. For the sake of general purpose programming language, CPL was introduced by Cambridge University. But this programming

language was hard to learn and difficult to implement. BCPL came to emerge as simplified version of CPL. But it was so simple to solve specific problems. At the same time, a language called B was written by Ken Thmpson at AT&T’s Bell Lab. It was too further simplification of CPL. Just like BCPL, B too turned out to be very specific. Denis Ritchie writes a programming language by inheriting the features of B, BCPL and his own concept to develop C. Its name became C because it was the immediate predecessor of B language. Unlike BASIC or Pascal, C was not written as teaching language, but as an implementation language.

Features: C is a computer language and a programming tool which has grown popular because programmers preferred it. It is a tricky language but a masterful one. If you have come to C in the hope of finding a powerful language for writing everyday computer programs, then you will not be disappointed. C is ideally suited to modern computers and modern programming. Hence, it is broadly used all around world, from palmtop to mainframe computer and even in supercomputers. The C programming languages has the following features:

It has small size.
It has extensive use of function call.
It is a strong structural language having powerful data definition methods.
It has low level (Bit Wise) programming available.
It can handle low level activities.
Pointer makes it very strong for memory manipulations.
It has high level constructors.
It can produce efficient programs.
It can be compiled on variety of computers.

Advantages and disadvantages of C language:
C programming has large numbers of advantages over limited numbers of disadvantages. Because of its advantages, still it becomes broadly used programming language. It is easiest to learn, hence it is broadly used as educational purpose programming language. The input and output of a program can be viewed easily with some lines of code. The advantages and disadvantages of C programming as follows:

Advantages:
It is machine independent programming language.
It is easy to learn and implement C language.
It can be implemented from mobile device to mainframe computers.
It is the mother of all modern programming languages, Python is fully written in C language.

Disadvantages:
There is no runtime checking. It has poor error detection system.
On large programs, it is hard to fix errors.
There is no strict type checking int data type to float variables.
It does not support modern programming methodologies oriented programming language.