C ( pronounced / ˈ s iː / – like the letter c ) [6] is a general-purpose computer programming language . It was created in the 1970s by Dennis Ritchie , and remains very widely used and influential. By design, C's features cleanly reflect the capabilities of the targeted CPUs. It has found lasting use in operating systems , device drivers , protocol stacks , though decreasingly [7] for application software . C is commonly used on computer architectures that range from the largest supercomputers to the small
A successor to the programming language B , C was originally developed at Bell Labs by Ritchie between 1972 and 1973 to construct utilities running on Unix . It was applied to re-implementing the kernel of the Unix operating system. [8] During the 1980s, C gradually gained popularity. It has become one of the most widely used programming languages , [9] [10] with C compilers available for practically all modern computer architectures and operating systems. The book The C Programming Language , co-authored b
C is an imperative procedural language, supporting structured programming , lexical variable scope and recursion , with a static type system . It was designed to be compiled to provide low-level access to memory and language constructs that map efficiently to machine instructions , all with minimal runtime support . Despite its low-level capabilities, the language was designed to encourage cross-platform programming. A standards -compliant C program written with portability in mind can be compiled for a wid