Overview of C programming

History

C evolved from two previous languages, BCPL and B. BCPL was developed in 1967 by Martin Richards as a language for writing operating systems and compilers.

The C language was evolved Dennis Ritchie at Bell Laboratories and was originally implemented in 1972.Many of today’s leading operating systems are written in C and/or C++. C is mostly hardware independent—with careful design, it’s possible to write C programs that are portable to most computers.

The new C standard

The new C standard (referred to as C11) refines and expands the capabilities of C. Not all popular C compilers support the new features.

When programming in C you’ll typically use the following building blocks:

• C Standard Library functions
• Functions you create yourself
• Functions other people have created and made available to you

Steps of creating and executing a Program

1. Programmer creates program in the editor and stores it on disk.
2. Preprocessor program processes the code.
3. Compiler creates object code and stores it on disk.
4. Linker links the object code with the libraries. Creates an executable file and stodes it on disk.
5. The loader takes the executable image from disk and transfers it to memory.
6. The computer, under the control of its CPU, executes the program one instruction at a time.

Download C/C++ compilers & editors

You can choose between the two editors to create and compile your C programs and codes. Download from ufficial websites and be ready to learn with us the fundamentals of C programming.

Note:

We suggest you to compile our codes in Visual Studio Community or Eclipse because they are more professional and adapted to the new C standard described above.

In the next tutorial you will learn how to configure Visual Studio Community to run and compile C programs.