History of C language

History of C language

C language has evolved from three different structured language ALGOL, BCPL and B Language. It uses many concepts from these languages while introduced many new concepts such as datatypes, struct, pointer etc. In 1988, the language was formalised by American National Standard Institute(ANSI). In 1990, a version of C language was approved by the International Standard Organisation(ISO) and that version of C is also referred to as C89.

The idea behind creating C language was to create an easy language which requires a simple compiler and enables programmers to efficiently interact with the machine/system, just like machine instructions.

C language compiler converts the readable C language program into machine instruction.

Latest Version of C

The current latest version of C language is C11, which was introduced in 2011. It is supported by all the standard C language compilers.

Many new features have been introduced in this version and an overall attempt to improve compatibility of the C language with C++ language has been made. We will learn about the C11edition, once we are done with learning C language, towards the end of this tutorial series.