C development on Linux – Introduction

[ Thanks to LinuxCareer.com for this link.
]

“2.1. History: C is more than 40 years old, with beginnings at
Bell Labs with Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson as
the ‘usual suspects.’ Unix development and C’s evolution are
intimately linked, as we said, because Unix was initially written
in assembly, but that had lots of shortcomings. Therefore, when
moving to the PDP-11 as the main hardware platform, the developers
started C as the as a core language for Unix. In 1978, Kernighan
and Ritchie wrote, ‘The C Programming Language,’ a book that is
today as it was 20 years ago: THE book on C programming. We
heartily recommend you get it.

“2.2. Classification: There are always people keen on
classification of things and of course, programming is no
different. Joking aside, since we’re at the beginning, we thought
you should know that C is a procedural structured programming
language, with weak typing. What we just said, in English, is that
C uses procedures (the usual name used by C programmers, and the
one we’ll use as well, is functions however), that it uses a
structured approach (think blocks of code) and finally, it supports
implicit type conversions. If you don’t know what any of the above
means, fear not, you’ll find out!”

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