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C is a general-purpose programming language of the "curly braces" family. It is one of the most commonly used programming languages in the world and only recently being phased out in game development in favour of C++ and other languages.
History[]
When the PDP-11 computer arrived at Bell Labs, Dennis Ritchie built on B to create a new language called C which inherited Thompson's taste for concise syntax, and had a powerful mix of high-level functionality and the detailed features required to program an operating system. Most of the components of Unix were eventually rewritten in C, culminating with the kernel itself in 1973. Because of its convenience and power, C went on to become the most popular programming language in the world over the next quarter century.
The first publication of the C language, although not a standard, is known as the K&R C (Kernighan & Richie) which was published in 1978 in the book The C Programming Language. The earlier versions of C did not use argument declaration in the function prototype, nor did it need a prototype declaration before use since the function would then be assumed to be of type int
.
The first publication of a C standard was the ANSI C (known as C89) published in 1989. All publications and/or standards prior to C89 is known as pre-ANSI C. C89 is one of the most widespread, supported and portable standards. ISO made a standard short after in 1990 known as C90 which is more or less the same language as C89. C89/C90 is usually in reference to the same standard, omitting the difference.
ISO published a newer standard in 1999 known as C99 to address some of C's shortcomings, followed by a ANSI publication in 2000. This was also due to C++'s progressive development that was leaving C behind. C99 is more strict then the previous standards, e.g. omission of the type specifier no longer has int
implicitly assumed.
See here for examples of standards differences.
Developing in C[]
Don't have a C or C++ development environment? Click here for information on the various free and commercial development environments available for your platform. Learning C++? Look here for a list of useful online resources.
For tutorials on this site for C programming, look here.
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