Introduction To C

Before we can start writing serious programs in C, it would be interesting to know what it is C, how it came into existence and how it compares with other languages. This post briefly summarizes these issues.

Four important aspects of any language are the way it stores data, how it operates on these data, how it performs input and output and how you control the execution sequence of instructions in a program . I would like to discuss the first three of these building blocks in this post.

What is C?

C is a programming language developed at Bell Laboratories AT & T U.S. in 1972. It was designed and written by a man named Dennis Ritchie. In the seventies C began to replace the language of the era known as PL / I, ALGOL, etc. No one pushed C. There was no "official" Bell Labs, language. Therefore, without any advertising and its reputation spread C user group grew. Ritchie seems to have been quite surprised that many programmers prefer C to the ancient languages ??such as FORTRAN or PL / I, or the newer ones, such as Pascal and APL. But, that's what happened.
Possibly why C seems so popular is because it is reliable, simple and easy to use. Moreover, in an industry where new languages, tools and technologies emerge and vanish day by day, a language that has survived for over three decades has to be really good.
An opinion that is often heard today is - "C has been superseded by other languages ??like C + +, C # and Java, so why  C learn today. "I seriously disagree with this view. There are several reasons for this:

(A). I think nobody can learn C + + or Java directly. This is because while learning languages ??have things like classes, objects, inheritance, polymorphism, templates, exception handling, references, etc. involved in addition to knowing the elements of the current language. Learning these complicated concepts when it is not even comfortable with the basics of the language is like putting the cart before the horse. Therefore, they must first learn all the elements of a language very well using the C language before migrating to C + +, C # or Java. Although this two-step process of learning can take longer, but eventually you will definitely find it worth the hassle.

(B).C + +, C # or Java to use a principle called Object Oriented Programming (OOP) to organize the program. This organizing principle has a lot of advantages to offer. But even while using this principle of organization that would still need a good grip on the language elements of C and basic programming skills.

(C).Although many C + + and Java-based programming frameworks have evolved over the years the importance of the C is still unanswered, because knowingly or unknowingly while using these frameworks and tools are still required to use the core C language elements-another good reason for one to learn C before C + +, C # or Java.

(D).The main parts of popular operating systems including Windows, UNIX, Linux is still written in C. This is because even today, when it comes to performance (execution speed) there is nothing like C. On the other hand, if you extend the operating system to work with new devices needed to write software drivers. These programs are exclusively written in C.

There certainly are many reasons for you to know why C is needed by all of us but I hope these are very compelling reasons why one should take C as the first and important step in their quest for learning programming languages.