C

C Language Page - arranged by In-Young Ko CSCI Dept., University of Southern California, August 30, 1996

1. History and Philosophy of C

CPL stands for Cambridge Programming Language. Developed in the early 60s, it was extended by Martin Richards in 1967 to BCPL. BCPL was studied by the staff at Bell Labs, who were creating the UNIX operating system. They devised a variant, called B, for systems programming. But it was found to be inadequate, partially because it lacked explict types. All data were machine words. In 1972, Dennis Ritchie designed the language he called C. In 1978 he and Kernighan published a book on C, and this (K&R C) became the defning document for the language until around 10 years later when an ANSI C was completed.

One of the main reasons that C has gained such prominence is because much of UNIX is written in C.

In 1989, the ANSI standards committee agreed to a C standard, X3.159- 1989. The standard was in part infuenced by C++, in particular function prototypes, support for multinational character sets, and formalizing the run-time libraries.


2. Tutorials on C


3. Reference Manuals and Libraries on C


4. C Grammar


5. C Compilers


6. Issues on C

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