Interesting Facts About C Language

C Programming language is a general purpose, case-sensitive, procedural programming language. It is one of the first and few high-level languages that is still popular among the coding community. It was developed by Dennis Ritchie and was first released in 1972.

C programming language has a rich history and unique characteristics making it a topic of interest among the programming community. In this article, we will look at some of the most interesting facts about the C Programming Language.

Interesting Facts about C Programming Language

The following are some of the interesting facts about the C programming language:

C Language Facts

1. The C Language was not called C at the beginning. It was first known as New B as it was an improved version of the B programming language. As C comes next to B in the English alphabet, it was renamed C later before its release.
   
   

   History of C

2. C is the only programming language that has existed for such a long period and still it is widely used. It was released in 1972 and still rank 2nd on the TIOBE Index and 4th in IEEE Spectrum Index.
3. C was first developed for the Unix Operating System. Unix was also one of the first operating system whose kernels implemented in a language other than assembly and that was C. Even now, majority of the popular operating systems’ kernal is written in C.
4. C is also called the mother of all modern programming languages. Many programming languages like C++, Java, JavaScript, Go, C#, PHP, Python, Perl, Rust, etc. borrows the syntax, concepts from the C programming language.
5. Previously, C was considered as a high-level language but today many programmers consider it as a mid-level language as it supports only scalar operations and provide lower level memory management.
6. The ISO C17 is the latest version of C programming Language published in June 2018. The C23 standard is set to be released in 2024.
7. Currently, C is the fastest programming language in the world.

C Language Coding Facts

Apart from the historical facts, there are also a lot of coding facts related to C that you may not know of. Some of these facts are given below:

1. “? : ” is the only ternary operator in C language.
2. “sizeof” is the only operator which is also a keyword.
3. A C program can actually run without the main() function.
4. C Language is still the first language of the 95% of the programmers.
5. The statement arr[index] and index[arr] are same.
6. In printf() and scanf(), f stands for formatted not function.
7. Compiler doesn’t know header file, preprocessor processes these and expands source code.
8. Header file name can be included in 2 ways, (a) Using angular brackets (b) Using double inverted comma.
9. Compiler generates assembly code not machine code and then assembler generates the machine code.
10. sizeof operator cannot tell us the size of functions because this operator works on compile time and functions loads in memory at run time.