language: en

The Development of the C Language

Dennis M. Ritchie
AT&T Bell Laboratories
Murray Hill, NJ 07974 USA
dmr@research.att.com

ABSTRACT The C programming language was devised in the early 1970s as a system implementation language for the nascent Unix operating system. Derived from the typeless language BCPL, it evolved a type structure; created on a tiny machine as a tool to improve a meager programming environment, it has become one of the dominant languages of today. This paper studies its evolution.

Introduction