The Development of the C Language

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The Development of the C Language. Dennis M. Ritchie. Bell Labs/Lucent Technologies. Murray Hill, NJ 07974 USA. dmr@bell-labs.com. ABSTRACT …

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The Development of the C Language
Dennis M. Ritchie
Bell Labs/Lucent Technologies
Murray Hill, NJ 07974 USA
dmr@belllabs.
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
This paper is about the development of the C programming language, the influences on it, and the
conditions under which it was created. For the sake of brevity, I omit full descriptions of C itself,
its parent B [Johnson 73] and its grandparent BCPL [Richards 79], and instead concentrate on
characteristic elements of each language and how they evolved.
C came into being in the years 19691973,
in parallel with the early development of the
Unix operating system; the most creative period occurred during 1972. Another spate of changes
peaked between 1977 and 1979, when portability of the Unix system was being demonstrated. In
the middle of this second period, the first widely available…