Introduction to C:

The C Programming Language is a general-purpose, high-level language that was originally developed by Dennis M. Ritchie in 1972 at AT&T (American Telephonic & Telegraphic) Bell Laboratories, New Jersey. It was mainly influenced by the languages ‘BPCL’ and ‘B’.

The American National Standard Institute (ANSI) established a committee in 1983 to standardize the C language. It was named as ‘C’ to present it as the successor of ‘B’ language which was designed earlier by Ken Thompson in 1970 for the first UNIX System.

What is C Programming Language

Dennis M. Ritchie – en.wikipedia.org

The C programming language is nearer to both machine and human, which means that we can perform low-level memory management operations by writing instructions in human-readable text form. C can be used for creating computer applications, writing embedded software, and also writing applications that extend an operating system’s functionality.

Programming languages can be classified into three categories as mentioned below:

  • Low-level Programming Language: Here,  communication with the system is in binary format i.e., in, 0’s, and 1’s, which can be directly executed. This means that these languages provide instructions that can be used to perform low-level operations like memory management etc. For example Assembly language, etc.
  • High-level Programming Language: Here, communication with the system is in the form of text which can be easily read/understood by humans. For example JavaScript, Python, etc.
  • Middle-level Programming Language: These are the languages that support both the features of low-level and high-level programming languages. These are also written in a text which can easily be read by humans. They use tools like Compilers to convert the instructions that are readable by humans (high-level language constructs) into low-level executable code(binary format). For example C, C++, etc…..

Advantages and Disadvantages of C Language:

Advantages of using C Language:

C  is considered to be one of the most fundamental languages to learn. Many other languages such as C++, JAVA, Python, etc… are built using C language. Some of the advantages of programming in C languages are listed here:

  • Simple and Portable Language
  • Middle-level Language.
  • Built-in Functions and Rich Library.
  • Fast and Efficient
  • Structured Programming Language
  • Easy to Extend
  • Modularity

Disadvantages of using C Language:

Apart from major advantages, there are some limitations to using C Language. Some of them are mentioned here:

  • Lack of Objective Oriented Programming Concepts
  • Lack of Exception Handling
  • Low level of Abstraction
  • Lack of Exception Handling
  • Doesn’t support the concept of namespace
  • Doesn’t support the concept of Constructor and Destructor

References:

Happy Learning 🙂