Smaller C

Chapter 1. The ABCs of C

C is a powerful language. It is procedural (meaning you do a lot of your coding work with procedures) and compiled (meaning the code you write must be translated for use by a computer using a compiler). You can write your procedures anywhere you can edit a text file, and you can compile those procedures to run on anything from supercomputers to the tiniest of embedded controllers. It’s a fantastic, mature language—I’m glad you’re here learning about it!

C has been around for quite some time: it was developed in the early 1970s by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs. You might have heard of him as one of the authors of the canonical C programming book, The C Programming Language with Brian Kernighan (Pearson). (If you see or hear or read about the phrase “K&R” in the programming world, that’s a reference to the book.) As a general purpose, procedural language built with an eye toward keeping programmers connected to the hardware their programs would run on, C caught on with both academic and industrial institutions outside Bell Labs to run a growing array of computers and remains a viable systems programming language.

Like all languages, C is not static. And with nearly 50 years under its belt, C has undergone many changes and spawned a great number of other languages. You can see its influence in the syntax of languages as disparate as Java and Perl. Indeed, some of C’s elements are so universal that you see it show up in pseudocode examples meant to represent ...