The C Programming Language, 2nd edition, is a widely used reference on ANSI C.

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C is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative computer programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system. more...

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It has since spread to many other platforms, and is now one of the most widely used programming languages. C has also greatly influenced many other popular languages, especially C++, which was originally designed as an enhancement to C. It is the most commonly used programming language for writing system software, though it is also widely used for writing applications.

Philosophy

C is a minimalistic programming language. Among its design goals were that it could be compiled in a straightforward manner using a relatively simple compiler, provide low-level access to memory, generate only a few machine language instructions for each of its core language elements, and not require extensive run-time support. As a result, C code is suitable for many systems-programming applications that had traditionally been implemented in assembly language.

Despite its low-level capabilities, the language was designed to encourage machine-independent programming. A standards-compliant and portably written C program can be compiled for a very wide variety of computer platforms and operating systems with minimal change to its source code. The language has become available on a very wide range of platforms, from embedded microcontrollers to supercomputers.

Characteristics

C is a procedural programming paradigm, with facilities for structured programming. It allows lexical variable scope and recursion. Its static type system prevents many meaningless operations. Parameters of C functions are always passed by value. Pass-by-reference is achieved in C by explicitly passing pointer values. Heterogeneous aggregate data types (the struct in C) allow related data elements to be combined and manipulated as a unit.

C has a small set (around 30) of reserved keywords.

C also has the following specific properties:

Weak typing — for instance, characters can be used as integers (similar to assembly); Low-level access to computer memory via machine addresses and typed pointers; Function pointers allow for a rudimentary form of closures and runtime polymorphism; Array indexing as a secondary notion, defined in terms of pointer arithmetic; A standardized C preprocessor for macro definition, source code file inclusion, conditional compilation, etc.; A simple, small core language, with functionality such as mathematical functions and file handling delegated to library routines; Free-format source text, using semicolon as a statement terminator (not a delimiter as in Pascal); A large number of operators constructed from nonalphanumeric symbols, for example { ... } rather than Algol's begin ... end; Use of && and || for logical "and" and "or", which

are syntactically distinct from C's bit-wise operations (& and |) — C's predecessor B used & and | for both meanings; never evaluate the right operand if the result can be determined from the left alone ("short-circuit" or Minimal evaluation);