What is C?

The C programming language is in reality a family of languages. The original C language was devised by Dennis Ritchie from Ken ThompsonŐs B systems programming language, which in turn was based on BCPL. This dialect is often referred to as K&R C after Kernighan and Ritchie, who wrote the first book explaining it. Today K&R C has been largely replaced by ANSI C, which is the product of an international standardisation effort.

ANSI C tidies up the many versions of C that had evolved and created an agreed language definition for the first time. In this first course we take a quick tour through ANSI C. In a second course we consider C++, another descendant of K&R C, which was defined at about the same time and which heavily influenced many ANSI C features, while managing to be incompatible in subtle ways.

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