First Impression

1
First Impression

• C ?

2
History of C

• 1967 "B" and BCPL developed (typeless)
• 1972 C language developed at Bell Labs
• Dennis Ritchie wrote C for Unix OS
• Needed C for work with Unix
• late 70s C becomes popular for OS development
  by many vendors
• Many variants of the language developed
• ANSI standard C in 1987-89

3
History of C (continued)

• early 80s Bjarne Stroustrup developed C in
  1979 at Bell Labs as an enhancement to the C
  programming language and named it "C with
  Classes". In 1983 it was renamed to C.
• 90s continued evolution of the language and its
  applications
• preferred language for OS and low level
  programming
• popular language for application development
• low level control and high level power

4
Conceptually what is C

• Alternatives
• is it C, with lots more options and features?
• is it an OO programming language with C as its
  core?
• is it a development environment?
• On most systems it is a development environment,
  language, and library, used for both procedural
  and object oriented programming, that can be
  customized and extended as desired
• Actually
• C is a general-purpose programming language
  with high-level and low-level capabilities,
  thats why sometimes regarded as middle level
  language.

5
Summary from The Design and Evolution of C by
Bjarne Stroustrup

• C is designed to be a statically typed.
• C is designed to directly and comprehensively
  support multiple programming styles.
• C is designed to be as compatible with C as
  possible.
• C avoids features that are platform specific or
  not general purpose.
• C does not incur overhead for features that are
  not used.
• C is designed to function without a
  sophisticated programming environment.

6
Advantages of C

• Available on most machines
• Can get good performance
• Can get small size
• Can manage memory effectively
• Can control everything
• Good supply of programmers
• Suitable for almost any type of program (from
  systems programs to applications)

7
Disadvantages of C

• Tends to be one of the less portable languages
• Complicated!!!
• 40 operators, intricate precedence, pointers,
  etc.
• can control everything
• many exceptions and special cases
• tremendous libraries both standard, vendor
  specific, and available for purchase, but all are
  intricate
• Aspects above can result in high cost,
  maintenance and reliability problems