Discuss about the brief history of C programming.

C was invented in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories. C is the result of the development process that started with an older language called BCPL. BCPL was developed by Martin Richards, and it influence a language called B, which was invented by Ken Thompson. B led to the development of C in the 1970s.

C was largely confined to use within Bell Laboratories until 1978, when Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie published a definitive description of the language in their book The C Programming Language (Prentice Hall, 1978). The Kernighan and Ritchie description is commonly referred to as “K&R C.”

Following the publication of the K&R description, computer professionals, impressed with C’s many desirable features, began to promote the use of the language. By the mid 1980s, the popularity of C had become widespread. Numerous C compliers and interpreters had been written for computers of all sizes, and many commercial application programs had been developed. Moreover, many commercial software products that were originally written in other languages were rewritten in C in order to take advantage of its efficiency and its portability.

Early commercial implementations of C differed somewhat from Kernighan and Ritchie’s original definition, resulting in minor incompatibilities between different implementations of the language. These differences diminished the portability that the language attempted to provide. Consequently, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI committee X3J11) has developed a standardized definition of the C language. Virtually all commercial C compilers and interpreters now adhere to the ANSI standard, many also provided additional features of their own.