Definition: C

(1) See coulomb.

(2) A high-level programming language developed at Bell Labs that is also able to manipulate the computer at a low level like assembly language. Developed in the 1970s, by the end of the 1980s, C became the language of choice for developing commercial software. There are C/C++ compilers for all major platforms. C, and its object-oriented successor C++, are used to write a huge variety of applications and many operating systems. In 1989, C was standardized by ANSI (X3J11 committee) and ISO.

C++ (C Plus Plus)
Created by Bjarne Stroustrup in 1983, C++ added object-oriented programming (OOP) to C. Originally called "C with Classes," C++ became the standard C language, often designated as C/C++. In contrast, Smalltalk and other object-oriented languages did not provide the familiar structures of conventional languages such as C and Pascal. See object-oriented programming, Smalltalk, Visual C++, Objective-C, C# and Managed C++.

Nothing But Functions
C and C++ are written as a series of functions that call each other for processing. Even the body of the program is a function named "main." Functions are very flexible, allowing programmers to choose from the standard library or write their own, which they do in every program. They can also use third-party libraries for specific purposes. See function.

Its Origin
C was developed to allow the Unix operating system to run on different computers. After Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie of Bell Labs created Unix and got it running on PDP minicomputers, they wanted to port it to other machines without having to rewrite it. Thompson created the B language, which was a simpler version of BCPL, itself a version of CPL. Later, in order to improve B, Thompson and Ritchie created C. See CPL, PDP and B.

The following examples convert Fahrenheit to centigrade in C and C++. For another example of C code, see event loop.

 In C

 main()   {
  float fahr;
  printf("Enter Fahrenheit: ");
  scanf("%f", &fahr);
  printf("Celsius is %f\n", (fahr-32)*5/9);
          }


 In C++

 void main() {
  float fahr;
  cout << "Enter Fahrenheit: "; 
  cin >> fahr;
  fahr = (((fahr-32)*5)/9);
  cout << "Celsius = " << fahr << endl;
  return 0;
             }