The C Language

In the early 1970s, Dennis Ritchie of Bell Laboratories was working on a project to develop the Unix operating system. (An operating system is a set of programs that manages a computer’s resources and handles its interactions with users. For example, it’s the operating system that puts the system prompt onscreen for a terminal-style interface that manages the windows and mice for graphical interfaces and that runs programs for you.) For this work Ritchie needed a language that was concise, that produced compact, fast programs, and that could control hardware efficiently.

Traditionally, programmers met these needs by using assembly language, which is closely tied to a computer’s internal machine language. However, assembly language is a low-level language—that is, it works directly with the hardware (for instance, accessing CPU registers and memory locations directly). Thus, assembly language is specific to a particular computer processor. So if you want to move an assembly program to a different kind of computer, you may have to completely rewrite the program, using a different assembly language. It was a bit as if each time you bought a new car, you found that the designers decided to change where the controls went and what they did, forcing you to relearn how to drive.

But Unix was intended to work on a variety of computer types (or platforms). That suggested using a high-level language. A high-level language is oriented toward problem solving instead of toward specific hardware. Special programs called compilers translate a high-level language to the internal language of a particular computer. Thus, you can use the same high-level language program on different platforms by using a separate compiler for each platform. Ritchie wanted a language that combined low-level efficiency and hardware access with high-level generality and portability. So building from older languages, he created C.