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Sunday, April 6, 2014

A BRIEF HISTORY OF C


C language is the member of ALGOL-60 based languages. As I have already said, C is neither a language that is designed from scratch nor had perfect design and contained many flaws.
CPL (Combined programming language) was a language designed but never implemented. Later BCPL (Basic CPL) came as the implementation language for CPL by Martin Richards. It was refined to language named as B by Ken Thompson in 1970 for the DEC PDP-7. It was written for implementing UNIX system. Later Dennis M. Ritche added types to the language and made changes to B to create the language what we have as C language.

C derives a lot from both BCPL and B languages and was for use with UNIX on DEC PDP-11 computers. The array and pointer constructs come from these two languages. Nearly all of the operators in B is supported in C. Both BCPL and B were type-less languages. The major modification in C was addition of types. [Ritchie 1978] says that the major advance of C over the languages B and BCPL was its typing structure. “The type-less nature of B and BCPL had seemed to promise a great simplification in the implementation, understanding and use of these languages… (but) it seemed inappropriate, for purely technological reasons, to the available hardware”. It derives some ideas from Algol-68 also.

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