C programming language is a procedural programming language that was initially developed by Dennis Ritchie in the year 1972 at Bell Laboratories of AT&T Labs. 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 a clean style, these features make C language suitable for system programming like an operating system or compiler development.
Here are some of the most important features of the C language:
- Procedural Language: In a procedural language like C, predefined instructions are carried out step by step. A 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 a particular programming language works. There are other programming paradigms as well in the programming world.
- Fast and Efficient: Newer languages like Java and 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 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 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 C programming language code in the form of libraries for further future uses is known as modularity. This programming language can do very little on its own most of its power is held by its libraries. C language has its own library to solve common problems.
- 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. This means each time a programmer types a program they have to mention the type of variables used.
- General-Purpose Language: From system programming to photo editing software, the C programming language is used in various applications 3. 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: The main features of C language include low-level access to memory, a simple set of keywords, and a clean style, these features make C language suitable for system programming like an operating system or compiler development.
I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any further questions about C or anything else.