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Introduction to C

 C is a programming language developed at AT & T’s Bell Laboratories of USA in 1972. It was designed and written by a man named Dennis Ritchie. In the late seventies C began to replace the more familiar languages of that time like PL/I, ALGOL, etc ANSI C standard emerged in the early 1980s, this book was split into two titles: The original was still called Programming in C, and the title that covered ANSI C was called Programming in ANSI C. This was done because it took several years for the compiler vendors to release their ANSI C compilers and for them to become ubiquitous. It was initially designed for programming UNIX operating system. Now the software tool as well as the C compiler is written in C. Major parts of popular operating systems like Windows, UNIX, Linux is still written in C. This is because even today when it comes to performance (speed of execution) nothing beats C. Moreover, if one is to extend the operating system to work with new devices one needs to write device driver programs. These programs are exclusively written in C. C seems so popular is because it is reliable, simple and easy to use. often heard today is – “C has been already superceded by languages like C++, C# and Java.

There is a close analogy between learning English language and learning C language. The classical method of learning English is to first learn the alphabets used in the language, then learn to combine these alphabets to form words, which in turn are combined to form sentences and sentences are combined to form paragraphs. Learning C is similar and easier. Instead of straight-away learning how to write programs, we must first know what alphabets, numbers and special symbols are used in C, then how using them constants, variables and keywords are constructed, and finally how are these combined to form an instruction. A group of instructions would be combined later on to form a program. So a computer program is just a collection of the instructions necessary to solve a specific problem. The basic operations of a computer system form what is known as the computer’s instruction set. And the approach or method that is used to solve the problem is known as an algorithm. So for as programming language concern these are of two types. 

 (1) Low level language

 (2) High level language

Low level language:

Low level languages are machine level and assembly level language. In machine level language computer only understand digital numbers i.e. in the form of 0 and 1. So, instruction given to the computer is in the form binary digit, which is difficult to implement instruction in binary code. This type of program is not portable, difficult to maintain and also error prone. The assembly language is on other hand modified version of machine level language. Where instructions are given in English like word as ADD, SUM, MOV etc. It is easy to write and understand but not understand by the machine. So the translator used here is assembler to translate into machine level. Although language is bit easier, programmer has to know low level details related to low level language. In the assembly level language the data are stored in the computer register, which varies for different computer. Hence it is not portable.

High level language: 

 These languages are machine independent, means it is portable. The language in this category is Pascal, Cobol, Fortran etc. High level languages are understood by the machine. So it need to translate by the translator into machine level. A translator is software which is used to translate high level language as well as low level language in to machine level language.

Three types of translator are there: 

Compiler 

Interpreter 

 Assembler 

 Compiler and interpreter are used to convert the high level language into machine level language. The program written in high level language is known as source program and the corresponding machine level language program is called as object program. Both compiler and interpreter perform the same task but there working is different. Compiler read the program at-a-time and searches the error and lists them. If the program is error free then it is converted into object program. When program size is large then compiler is preferred. Whereas interpreter read only one line of the source code and convert it to object code. If it check error, statement by statement and hence of take more time.

Integrated Development Environments (IDE) 

The process of editing, compiling, running, and debugging programs is often managed by a single integrated application known as an Integrated Development Environment, or IDE for short. An IDE is a windows-based program that allows us to easily manage large software programs, edit files in windows, and compile, link, run, and debug programs. On Mac OS X, CodeWarrior and Xcode are two IDEs that are used by many programmers. Under Windows, Microsoft Visual Studio is a good example of a popular IDE. Kylix is a popular IDE for developing applications under Linux. Most IDEs also support program development in several different programming languages in addition to C, such as C# and C++.