1.6 C and C++

C was implemented in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Laboratories. It initially became widely known as the UNIX operating system’s development language. Today, most of the code for general-purpose operating systems is written in C or C++.

C++ evolved from C, which is available for most computers and is hardware independent. With careful design, it’s possible to write C programs that are portable to most computers.

The widespread use of C with various kinds of computers (sometimes called hardware platforms) unfortunately led to many variations. A standard version of C was needed. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) cooperated with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to standardize C worldwide; the ...

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