C is a procedural programming language. It was initially developed by Dennis Ritchie in the year 1972. It was mainly developed as a system programming language to write an operating system. The main features of C language include low-level access to memory, a simple set of keywords, and clean style, these features make C language suitable for system programmings like an operating system or compiler development.
Features of C Programming Language:
- Procedural Language
- Fast and Efficient
- Modularity
- Statically Type
- General Purpose Language
- Rich set of built in Operators
- Libraries with rich Functions
- Middle Level Language
- Portability
- Easy to Extend
Let us see the features one by one:
- Procedural Language: In a procedural language like C step by step predefined instructions are carried out. C program may contain more than one function to perform a particular task. New people to programming will think that this is the only way of a particular programming language works. There are other programming paradigms as well in the programming world. Most of the commonly used paradigm is an object-oriented programming language.
- Fast and Efficient: Newer languages like java, python offer more features than c programming language but due to additional processing in these languages, their performance rate gets down effectively. C programming language as the been middle-level language provides programmers access to direct manipulation with the computer hardware but higher-level languages do not allow this. That’s one of the reasons C language is considered as the first choice to start learning programming languages. It’s fast because statically typed languages are faster than dynamically typed languages.
- Modularity: The concept of storing of C programming language code in the form of libraries for further future uses is known as modularity. This programming language van does a very little on its own most of its power is held by its libraries. C language has it’s own library to solve common problems like in this we can use a particular function by using a header file stored in its library.
- Statically Type: C programming language is a statically typed language. Meaning the type of variable is checked at the time of compilation but not at run time. Means each time a programmer type a program they have to mention the type of variables used.
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General Purpose Language: From system programming to photo editing software, C programming language is used in various applications. Some of the common applications where it’s used are as follows:
- Operating systems: Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, OXS
- Databases: PostgreSQL, Oracle, MySQL, MS SQL Server etc.
- Rich set of built-in Operators: It is a diversified language with a rich set of built-in operators which are used in writing complex or simplified C programs.
- Libraries with rich Functions: Robust libraries and functions in C help even a beginner coder to code with ease.
- Middle-Level Language: As it is a middle-level language so it has the combined form of both capabilities of assembly language and features of the high level language.
- Portability: C language is lavishly portable as programs which are written in C language can run and compile on any system with either none or small changes.
- Easy to Extend: Programs written in C language can be extended means when a program is already written in it then some more features and operations can be added into it.
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