What is the History of C Language?
In earlier times, every programming language was created to fulfill
some purpose, such as Forton (Formula Translator) was created to
make Scientific and Mathematical Applications. Similarly, COBOL
(Common Business Oriented Language) was created to make business
applications.
In a similar way, C Language was also originally created to make the
Unix operating system. C Language was developed by Dennis Ritchie in
1972 at Bell Laboratories of AT&T (American Telephone & Telegraph).
Dennis Ritchie is said to be the inventor of the C language, but the
history of C language is quite interesting.
in 1960 Dennis Ritchie and some other employees working on a project
called Multics, at Bell Laboratories of AT&T (American Telephone &
Telegraph).
The aim of this project was to create an operating system for a large
computer on which thousands of people could work simultaneously.
But AT&T Bell Laboratories closed this project after a few years because
this project could not make money for them. After the closure of the
project, all the employees of this project got involved in the work of
another project.
Ken Thompson, who was also working on Project Multics, created a file
system. He used the knowledge gained from the Multics project to
further improve this file system.
When Ken Thompson completed the work of that system, he named the
system Unix, the entire code of this system was written in Assembly
Language.
Ken Thompson created Unix with the help of B Language, B Language
was created by Ken Thompson in 1969 by improving a little more the
language BCPL which was created by Martin Richards, so Ken
Thompson named his language in honor of Martin Richards.
BCPL was created in 1966 by Martin Richards to combine the basic
features of all other programming languages of the time. Which was
further improvised by Ken Thompson for his use and created the B
language.
The biggest drawback of B Language was that there was no concept of
“Data Types” (everything was expressed in machine language) and B
Language did not provide the functionality of “Structure”.
Dennis Ritchie created C Language in 1972, removing all these
drawbacks of B Language. Dennis Ritchie has added some more
features in C language along with removing the drawback of B
Language.
C Language was a powerful mixture of high-level functionality and
operating system building features. Therefore, many components of Unix
were re-written in the C language.
Kernighan and Ritchie wrote a book called, “The C Programming
Language, 1st edition” (Kernighan said that he has no contribution in the
design of C language. It has been made entirely by Dennis Ritchie, but
he ” Is the author of famous programs like Hello World ”and other Unix
programs).
ANSI (American National Standards Institute) published A standard of C
language in 1989 that was called ANSI C or “C89” due to this published
standard.
This standard was approved by the ISO (International Organization for
Standardization) in 1990, after that, it was called “C90”. In 1999, ISO
published another standard of C language for the internationalization of
C. after that C was called “C99”.
In 2011, another standard was published for C, after that, it was named
“C11” and in 2018, another standard of C was published that is called
“C18”. C18 is the latest standard in the C programming language.
History of C Language (Tabular Form)
Language Year Developed By
Algo 1960 International Group
BCPL 1966 Martin Richard
Traditional C 1969 Ken Thompson
K&RC 1972 Dennis Ritchie
ANSI C 1978 Kernighan & Dennis Ritchie
ANSI/ISO C 1989 ANSI Committee
C90 1990 ISO Committee
C99 1999 ISO Committee
C11 2011 Standardization Committee
C18 2018 Standardization Committee
