Chapter 01: How To Start C programming
In this Chapter you’ll learn the following:
- What C is
- Why you need to learn C
- The ANSI standard
- Hardware and software required in order to run the C program
What Is C?
C is a programming language. The C language was first developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at AT&T Bell Labs. Ritchie called his newly developed language C simply because there was a B programming language already. (As a matter of fact, the B language led to the development of C.)
C is a high-level programming language. In fact, C is one of the most popular general-purpose programming languages.
In the computer world, the further a programming language is from the computer architecture, the higher the language’s level. You can imagine that the lowest-level languages are machine languages that computers understand directly. The high-level programming languages, on the other hand, are closer to our human languages.
High-level programming languages, including C, have the following advantages:
- Readability: Programs are easy to read.
- Maintainability: Programs are easy to maintain.
- Portability: Programs are easy to port across different computer platforms.
The C language’s readability and maintainability benefit directly from its relative closeness to human languages, especially English.
Each high-level language needs a compiler or an interpreter to translate instructions written in the high-level programming language into a machine language that a computer can understand and execute. Different machines may need different compilers or interpreters for the same programming language. For instance, I use Microsoft’s C compiler to compile the C programs in this book for my personal computer (PC). If I need to run the C programs on a UNIX-based workstation, I have to use another type of C compiler to compile these programs. Therefore, the portability of programs written in C is realized by re-compiling the programs with different compilers for different machines.
Summary
In this Chapter you’ve learned the following:
- C is a general-purpose programming language.
- C is a high-level language that has the advantages of readability, maintainability, and portability.
- C is a very efficient language that allows you to get control of computer hardware and peripherals.
- C is a small language that you can learn easily in a relatively short time.
- Programs written in C can be reused.
- Programs written in C must be compiled and translated into machine-readable code before the computer can execute them.
- C provides many programming languages, such as Perl, C++, and Java, with basic concepts and useful features.
- The ANSI standard for C is the standard supported by all C compiler vendors to guarantee the portability of C.
- You can use any C compilers that support the ANSI standard and compile all C programs in this book.
