The programming language C emerged during the developmental process of an older language called BCPL. C was developed in the 1970s by Dennis Ritchie on a PDP-11 which used UNIX operating system. Although the work started in the 1970s itself, the first copy of ANSI C was made available to the people only in the early 1990. During 1990s, C++ came to existence which did not slow down the further development of C as expected.
C can be considered as a middle level language. This doesn’t prove C to be less power or a hard one to understand. Since C has implemented the best parts of high level languages and also have the flexibility of assembly language it is believed to be a middle level language. C is portable too. When comparing with other programming languages, C has very less keywords (about 32) thus enabling programmers to use C without difficulty.
At the beginning, C was used to create SYSTEM PROGRAMS which forms a part of Operating System and its utilities. Later due to its portability and efficiency, programmers began to use C for programming other tasks too.
Although C can be called as structured language since sub-routines can be created in it, it does not allow the concept of creating functions inside another function which excludes C from the list of strictly Block-Structured Languages like java, C++.
With the invention of C++, people thought that the language C will eventually die out. But it has never happened due to many solid reasons. One of the main reasons is that not all programs require object orientation thus allowing the programmer to remain with C itself, keeping the code simple. Applications for embedded systems are still coded using C. Another main reason for the survival of C till today and for a long time to come is that much of the existing code in the world is still C. People will choose to enhance them rather than switching to other languages like C++.
