Introduction to C Programming

Introduction to C Programming:

C is a general-purpose, imperative computer programming language. It was originally developed by Dennis Ritchie between 1969 and 1973 at Bell Labs. The C language is used to re-implement the Unix operating system. It also has been standardized by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) since 1989 and subsequently by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

The C language was designed to be compiled using a relatively straightforward compiler, to provide low-level access to memory, to provide language constructs that map efficiently to machine instructions, and to require minimal run-time support.

Despite its low-level capabilities, the language was designed to encourage cross-platform programming. The language has become available on a very wide range of platforms, from embedded microcontrollers to supercomputers.

Some features of the C language:

Easy to learn and understand.
A case-sensitive language and obey the scope rule.
It supports a large number of arithmetical and logical operators, such as +, +=, ++, &, ~, etc.
It has a small, fixed number of keywords, including a full set of control flow primitives: for, if else statement, while, switch, and do/while.
The user can create their own data types using the keywords enum, struct, and union.
Supports a preprocessor that executes before the compilation.
It supports pointers.
Low-level access to computer memory is possible by converting machine addresses to typed pointers.
C function return values can be ignored when not needed.
It does not support the oops concept.

Why use the C language?

There is a lot of reason to select C as the development language. I have mentioned a few points that describe why C is a popular language and why people use it.

It allows accessing the low level directly and that is the reason it is a good choice for driver and firmware development.
C is a very simple language and easy to learn and the most important thing is that whatever you learn with C will be directly transferable to future programming languages (depending on the language).
Still, C is a good choice for operating system development(including all of Unix).
C is used in the creation of language compiler and interpreter.
Programs that are created with C run very quickly.
There is a lot of legacy programs are written in C.
C language is also used in the database (Oracle Database).
C is a portable language (used in C++ and Android APP using JNI wrapper ..etc ).