In this post, we are going to discuss the history of the C programming language. Here, we will discuss the beginning and standardization of c language.
Beginning
C was developed during the development phase of the Unix operating system. Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others started Unix development in 1969 at the AT&T Bell Labs research center. Thompson wrote the original version of Unix that ran on DEC PDP-7 computer. DEC PDP-7 was the minicomputer that had only 8k words of main memory. Unix was previously written in Assembly language. It was challenging to debug and enhance the programs written in the Assembly language. Unix was also in this category.
So they decided that there was a need for a higher-level language for the more advanced version of Unix. So Thompson designed a new language called B. It was based on BCPL. BPCL was the system programming language developed in mid of 1960. Then Thompson wrote a portion of Unix in B by using PDP-11. By 1971, They realized that B was not suitable for PDP-11. Then Ritchie developed an extended version of B. Firstly, it was called NB (‘New B’). Later, its name changed to C. Later, Unix was written in C language. The main benefit of the C language was Portability. With the help of the C compiler on other computers, they were able to run Unix on different machines.
Standardization
C language evolved significantly in the 1970s. It was during this time that the first book of C came on the market. The book’s name was C Programming Language. It was written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie and published in 1978. This book became very famous in a short time. Because, at this time, there was no official standard of C, so this book was considered the standard of C. C had very few users in the 1970s. However, by the 1980s, C compilers became available on various machines running under different operating systems. And with this, the number of users of C also increased.
All programmers who developed C compilers used Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie’s book as a reference to write C code. But this book was vague about some concepts of C language. So compiler treated these concepts differently. So this was a big problem at that time. Therefore there was a need for a complete, accurate, and up-to-date language description of the C language.
The American Standard for C development started in 1983 under the auspices of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). After several changes, the standard was finalized in 1988 and formally approved in December 1989 as ANSI Standard X3.159-1989. In 1990, it was approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as the international standard ISO/IEC 9899:1990. However, the language experienced a few changes in 1995. More meaningful changes occurred with the publication of a new standard, ISO/IEC 9899:1999, in 1999.