Introduction and features of C Programming Language

C sis programming language developed at AT & T’s Bell Laboratories of the USA in the 1970’s. it was designed and developed by Dennis M. Ritchie. C seems so popular because it is reliable, simple and easy to use. C stands in between high-level language and low-level language. That is why it is often called a Middle-Level Language. It is designed to have both: relatively good programming efficiency (as compared to machine-oriented languages) and relatively good machine efficiency.

Features of C Programming Language

We briefly list some of C’s characteristics that define the languages and also have lead to its popularity as a programming language. We will be studying many of these aspects throughout the course. Some of the features of C programming language are:

1. Portability: one of the reasons of C’s popularity is its portability. We can easily transform a program written in C from one computer to another with few or no changes and compile with an appropriate compiler.
2. Faster and efficient: C is desirable because it is faster and more efficient than the comparable program in most other high-level-languages. For e.g. a program to increment a variable from 0 to 15000 takes about 50 second in BASIC while it takes 1 second in C.
3.  Supports structured programming: it is well suited for structured programming that means the problem might be solved in terms of function modules or blocks. The modular structure makes the program debugging, testing and maintenance easier.
4. Extensibility:  Another property of C is extensibility. C is basically a collection of functions that are supported by the C library. We can continuously add (or extend) our own functions to C.
5. Flexible: C is a flexible language. It permits us to write any complex programs with the help of its rich set of in-built functions and operators. In addition, it permits the use of low-level language. Hence, it is also called middle-level language and therefore it is well suited for both system and application software development.

Advantage of C Programming Languages:

• It is more efficient than unstructured code because of the minimized branching of the code
• Correction of errors (debugging) in a program is easy.
• Adding a new feature is easier and faster.
• Maintenance the C code is easy due to the readability of the code
• It is easy to interact with hardware
• It is easy to learn
• The program code is secured
• It is compact efficient to use.

Disadvantage of C Programming Languages:

• The program takes more time to design and implement the software.
• C coding techniques sometimes result in repeating code in a program
• C coding becomes less efficient if the sub-routines called frequently thereby killing the time.
• C does not have efficient garbage collection
• It doesn’t contain runtime checking
• There is no strict type checking (for example, we can pass an integer value for floating data type).
• As the program extends, it is very difficult to fix the bugs.

Structure of C Programming Languages

A program is a sequence of instructions. Instruction of a C program is written as a statement.

A statement is terminated by a semicolon (;). One or more statement form a block (compound) statement enclosed within a pair of Braces, i.e { }.

All executable statements must be inside a function. A function is a collection of statement which performs some specific task.

Every C program consists of one or more functions and every C program must contain a special function named main ().

The statements with this function are the first ones to be executed.

A comments is written with the delimiters /* and */

Comment example: /* this is a comment text */

Simple Program in C to display Hello World

#include<stdio.h>                 /* I/O header File*/
void main()                           /* main function heading */
{
printf("Hello World");            /* call to printf */

printf("Welcome to C Programming \n");
}

Output:

Class 11 computer Science Notes Chapter One Check Here