Background on the C Language
C is the programming language most frequently associated with UNIX. Since the 1970s, the bulk of the UNIX operating system and its applications have been written in C. Because the C language does not directly rely on any specific hardware architecture, UNIX was one of the first portable operating systems. In other words, the majority of the code that makes up UNIX does not know and does not care which computer it is actually running on. Machine-specific features are isolated in a few modules within the UNIX kernel, which makes it easy for you to modify them when you are porting to a different hardware architecture.
C was first designed by Dennis Ritchie for use with UNIX on DEC PDP-11 computers. The language evolved ...
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