18.10.2012: C Language:

Introduction

Let me introduce basic concept in C. The way it was designed and developed. C was designed and developed by Dennis Ritchie in 1972. C has a predecessor called the language ‘B’. Now lets look at the basic features that were developed in ’B’. B was developed in 1960 at the University of Cambridge mainly to overcome the defects that was there in the Basic combined programming language. Both these languages were not capable of handling the software defects the application that were existing at that time so there was a need to develop a more powerful language that could handle the software problems. That led to the development of this language ‘C’. C is called a middle -level computer language. What is this middle –level computer language signify a middle level language means something in between the high and low level languages so this C combines the features of high- level language and functionality of this assembly language. A high level language is something that we users can understand and a low level language or assembly language is one that the machines can understand. So we needed a language that could bridge the gap between us and the system so that was perfectly done by the software language C. Now this C acted as a bridge between us and the system. We were able to communicate in the form of programs that could solve the current problems at hand and the results that were produced by the system were communicated to us in an understandable manner so this feature of C was most well suited for developing both application software and system software. So what is this application software mean? A Software which is generated for a specific application for a specific problem is called application software for example we are viewing the power point slides which are prepared using MS-PowerPoint we cannot use MS-Excel or MS-Word in the same way to create a slide. A slide is meant to be created using the power point software so that indicates that this MS-PowerPoint is an application software meant for that particular application.