SUSANT K ROUT

EvolutionofClanguage
Evolution of C language C is like a sea. To sail over this sea one needs passion, patience and love for this language. It is quite interesting to explore how C took birth. In this session we will discuss how C was evolved from its predecessor B[Johnson 73], which is the successor of BCPL[Richards 67] It was named C because many of its features were derived from B where the C in C stands for Common or, perhaps, for Christopher. Programming language enters the history if it has a compiler or an interpreter or if it has inspired form other languages .C indeed has all these. Before to C, languages commonly in use were: FIRTST LANGUAGE; Ada Lovelace and Babbage and its nephew were writing projects for Difference Engine, and then the Analytical Engines. In 1945, K. Zuse, inventor of the Z3 computer would have defined an evolved language foe this engine. Few documents of the epoch about this language. ASSEMBLY; Assemblers exists since the beginning of the computers. They associate a symbolic name to the machine-language code. Assembly language is no longer frequently practiced, even to build fast routines. IPL (-1956-Information Processing Language); Low-level list processing language. Implements the RECURSIVITY. FORTRAN (-1954-1958- FORmula TRANslator System); Language dedicated to mathematical calculations.Fortan II (1958) introduced subroutines, functions, loops, a primitive FOR control structure. Identifiers were limited to 6 characters. LISP (-1958-1960- LISt Processing); It is a functional language for list processing. It is purely recursive. There is no difference between code and data. ALGOL (-1960/Algol W-1966/Algol 68- Algorithmic Language); this was a first language to be machine independent. It introduced a block of statements, local variables inside a block. BASIC (-1964- Beginners All Purpose Symbolic Instruction code); Basic has been designed in 1963 to be easy to learn and has been implemented in 1964. The first version was compiled, and then it becomes interactive and interpreted. Each line has a number to allow GOTOs statements to jump to the line! SIMULA 67(-1962-67); the goal was to build a tool to describe discrete event system, or network, and a language to program simulating real world. LOGO (1966); this was aimed to teach programming to children, real lisp and based on moving a turtle on screen. CPL (-combined programming language); this was a combination of Algol 60 and functional language aimed at proof of theorems. It was complex, not implemented but has been quoted because it was a step toward the design of the C language. BCPL (-1957-Basic CPL-Martin Richards); this has been intended to be a simplified version of CPLO. It uses the control structures: FOR, LOOP, IF THEN, WHILE, UNTIL, REPEAT, REPEAT WHILE, SWITCH CASE, etc.It owns procedures and functions, unlike C. PL/1 (-1965-Programming Language number One-Originally NPL- (New Programming Language)); this language was designed to be general p[purpose and modular. It is more hardware independent than predecessors. PASCAL (-1970-named from French mathematician Blaise Pascal); this language aimed to ease the building of compilers, and to lead teaching by forcing to a structured programming language. SMALLTALK (-1972); this is fully object oriented language which run always inside a graphical environment, with windows, mouse etc.. C Language (-1973-Dennis Ritchie); As C is successor of all the above languages, it inherit some properties from these languages like += Operator comes from Algol 68, ++ was already in B language. The keyword include comes from PL/1. C began life in 1971 as a system-programming language for the PDP-11 port of UNIX, based on Ken Thomsons earlier be interpreter which had in turn been modeled on BCPL, the Basic Common Programming Language designed at Cambridge University in 1966-67. C was first implemented by Dennis Ritchie at AT&T Bell. Before Dennis Ritchie ,Thompson had made a brief attempt to produce a system coded in an early version of C before structures- in 1972 , but gave up the effort .By early 1973 ,the essentials modern C were complete . The development of C was the result of programmers desired to play Space Travel. They had been playing it on their companys mainframe, but been Tags Recent Posts
214 Susant KRout October 2009

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underpowered and having to support about 100 users ,Thompson and Ritchie found they didnt have sufficient control over the spaceship to avoid collisions with the wandering space rocks .Thus, they decided to port the game to an idle PDP-7 in the office ,but it didnt have an operating system, so they set about writing one .Eventually they decided to port the operating system to the offices PDP11,but this was onerous since all the code was in assembly language . They decided to use a higher level portable language so the OS could be ported easily from one computer to another. They looked at using B, but it lacked functionality to take advantage of some of the PDP-11s advanced features so they set about creating the new language C. The first book of C and UNIX Portability and Practice, Portable C and UNIX system programming was published in 1987. In 1965, AT &T programmers were using BCPL to work on implementing UNIX. Displeased with this language, they made it to evolved to a newer version named B, then to a new language meant C. C was firstly designated to program the UNIX operating system, but has become quickly universal due to its portability and speed. C is quirky, flawed, and enormous success. While accidents of history surely helped, it evidently satisfied a need for a system implementation language, yet sufficiently abstract and fluent to describe algorithms and interactions in a wide variety of environment. BCPL,B and C all are suitable for traditional procedural and family typified by Fortran and Algol 60 .They are particularly oriented towards system programming ,are small and compactly described and are amenable to translation by simple compilers. They are closed to the machine in that the abstractions they introduce are readily grounded in the complete data types and operations supplied by conventional computers. With less success they also use library procedures to specify interesting control constructs such as coroutine and procedure closures. At the same time, their abstractions lie at a sufficiently level that, with care, portability between can be achieved. BCPL, B and C differ syntactically in many details, but broadly they are similar. Programs consist of a sequence of global declarations and function (procedure) declarations. Procedures can be nested in BCPL, but may not refer to non-static objects defined in containing procedures. B and C avoid this restriction by imposing a more severe one: no nested procedures at all. Each of the languages (except for earliest versions of B) recognizes separate compilation, and provides a means for including text from named files. By the early 1980s, the original C language had evolved into what is now known as traditional C by adding the void type, enumeration types, and some other improvement .In the late 1980s, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Committee created draft standards for what is known as ANSI C or standard C. The committee added the void * type, function prototypes, a new function definition syntax, and more functionality for preprocessor, and in general made the language definition more precise. Today, ANSI C is a mature, general-purpose language that is widely available on many machines and in many operating systems. It is one of the chief industrial programming languages of the world. Like Be the first to like this.

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