C is an extremely powerful programming language. C is a language written by programmers for programmers, it became the most popular programming language ever in 1978. UNIX, its tools, and C were developed almost simultaneously, C grew up with UNIX but has since then left its home and is available on just about every computer system around. The development of C is not over, a researcher Bjarne Stroustrup Of Bell Laboratories began experimenting with an object orientated flavour of C that he called C++ (c plus plus). C++ extended C, in Bjarne’s words “making a better C”. This tutorial focuses on C, not C++. The X3J11 committee have adopted some of Bjarne’s proposals into the ANSI C standard and since then an ANSI C++ standard has been created.
C++, however, didn’t take over from C. C++ isn’t for everyone and when learning C it’s advised that you stick to the basics, learn to program in C, and when you’re ready, move onto object-orientated C++.
C is a compiled language. For those of you that know Perl or PHP, you know that you write the source code and the Perl or PHP interpreter compiles the script on the fly (or interprets it). With C you must compile your source code into “machine language” before you can run the program. You write the source code, compile that source code into machine language that the computer can understand, and then run your program. Here is what you need to do:
- Install a Compiler, there are many out there.
- Learn the Basics of C.
- Compile your source code into machine code and run the program.
Let’s go on and learn more about compilers.
