The C language was designed and written by Dennis Ritchie. It was developed at AT & T's Bell Laboratory of USA and came out in the year 1972.
Even without much of a marketing since its release, the C language rose to fame because of it being simple, easy to use, reliable and in no time, its users grew to a huge number.
C language is a powerful computer programming language which can be used to create different kind of applications or system software
for different platforms.
The application which we can create in C language could be as simple, small as a video player and as a big, complex as an Operation System or a computer game.
C language is also mainly considered as a low-level programming language which also provides
low-level access to memory locations and registers of a computer. It is not just easy to code in C language but its programs are very fast to execute,
efficient and easily maintainable.
Let's us see some of the notable features of C language :
Main features of C
Primitive data types
In C, each variable has a specific data type,
where a data type tells us the size,
range and the type of a value that can be stored in a variable.
C provides us about seven data types known as primitive data types, which allow us to store and operate on all the possible kinds of values.
For more on data types in C, you may read Primitive data types in C .
Control Statements
Control statements like if, if-else, switch, while loop, break, continue etc
control the flow of our program. To know more about control statements, starting
with if statement.
Operators in C
C language provides different kinds of operators which allow us to easily perform simple to complex mathematical calculations using C language.
Operators such as -
arithmetic, increment, decrement, relational, logical etc. For more on operators, you can read our section
Operators in C .
Functions
One of the most important feature of C language is to allow us to create functions.
A function in a program contains a block of statements that is performing some particular task.
To know about how to create functions with C and much more, you may begin
at our section Function in C .
String
C allows us to create and store a sequence of characters known as string. In
order create, store and print such sequence of character, C provides us many
library function. To know about String and its various important methods, please begin at
read C String section.
Structure
Besides the primitive data types like int, char, float etc, C language provides us another data type called structure.
By using, structure, C allow us to create a data type, which can be a collection of
different primitive data type elements. For more on Structure, you may start with our section - Structure in C.
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File Input/Output
C language provide us console input/output functions. As the name says, the console input/output functions allow us to -
Read the input from the keyboard by the user accessing the console.
Display the output to the user at the console.
To begin with file input/output, please read our Input/Output in C section.
Disk Input/Output Operations
C language allows us to perform important Disk input/output operations such as - creating, reading, writing or modifying the file stored on the disk.
To begin with how to perform such disk I/O operations in C, you may begin at our
C - Disk Input/Output Operations section.