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