Dennis M. Ritchie
Abstract
The C programming language was devised in the early 1970s as a system implementation language for the nascent Unix operating system. Derived from the typeless language BCPL, it evolved a type structure; created on a tiny machine as a tool to improve a meager programming environment, it has become one of the dominant languages of today. This paper studies its evolution.
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Index Terms
- The development of the C language
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Reviews
Floyd S. Shipman
C is now the most widely used system implementation language. Its development began when the state of the art in system implementation languages was macro assemblers, and PL/I (IBM's one language for everything, including system implementation) was on its way to becoming a dinosaur. “C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success,” Ritchie states. In this paper, he describes the development and subsequent evolution of C. He explains how C evolved from BCPL to B to C, the influence of ALGOL68, minutia such as where ++x really came from, and how structures and pointers came to be in their current form. This is an interesting paper by a primary developer of C.
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