C LANGUAGE AND ITS FEATURES

C LANGUAGE

WHAT IS C LANGUAGE?

• Powerful features, simple syntax, and portability make C a preferred language among programmers for business and industrial applications.
•  Portability means that C programs written for a computer with a particular kind of processor, say Intel, can be executed on computers with different processors such as Motorola, Sun Sparc, or IBM with little or no modification. 
• C language is widely used in the development of operating systems. AnOperating System(OS) is a software(collection of programs) that controls the various functions of a computer.
• Also it makes other programs on your computer work. For example, you cannot work with a word processor program, such as Microsoft Word, if there is no operating system installed on your computer.
• Windows, Unix, Linux, Solaris, and MacOS are some of the popular operating systems.  

ORGIN OF C

• C is a general purpose programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs.
• In 1989, American National Standards Institute (ANSI) established a standard specification of C language called: "ANSI X3.159-1989 - Programming Language C".
• In 1999, a major revision of ANSI C specification was published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), "ISO/IEC 9899:1999 - Programming Languages - C".

Main features of C language:

• C is a procedural programming language, not an object-oriented programming language. C programs are organized as modules and functions.
• C supports low-level access to memory using address pointers. This makes C language a choice for implementing system software.
• C supports array data structure with two ways to access array elements, indexes and pointers.
• C supports dynamic memory allocation, which helps to reduce the size of object file generated by the compiler, and allow arrays to be declared with sizes determined at runtime.
• C supports a large number of library routines for input/output operations, string manipulations, mathematical functions, etc.
• C uses a header file to share declarations of variables and functions of a program module with other modules.
• C does not do bounds checking on arrays. This often leads to un-desired behaviors during program execution.

C language is used: 

1. Embedded Systems  
2. Systems Programming
3. Artificial Intelligence
4. Industrial Automation
5. Computer Graphics
6. Space Research
7. Image Processing
8. Game Programming