Basics of C programming History of C programming

                          History of C programming

Brain  Kernighan , Dennis Ritchie

              C was invented primarily by Brain  Kernighan , Dennis Ritchie working at AT&T Bell Labs in the United States. So the story goes, they used to play an "asteroids" game on the company mainframe computer. Unfortunately the performance of the machine left a lot to be desired. With the power of a 386 and around 100 users, they found they did not have sufficient control over the "spaceship". The were usually destroyed quickly by passing asteroids.

              Taking this rather personally, the decided to re-implement the game on a DEC PDP-7 which was sitting idle in the office. The language that was chosen was to be a variant of another language in use at the time ,called B. B is a word oriented language ideally suited to the PDP-7, but its facilities were not powerful enough to take advantage of the PDP-11 instruction set. Thus a new language C was invented.

Standardization

C turned out very popular and by the early 1980's hundreds of implementation  were being used by rapidly growing community of programmers. It was time to standardize the language.

ANSI

In America, the responsibility for standardizing languages is that of the American National Standards Institute , or ANSI.The language is now defined by ANSI Standard X3.159-1989.

 ISO

In the  International Arena, The International Standards Organization or ISO, is responsible for Standardizing computer languages.The ISO standard is thus the final authority on what constitutes the C programming language.