C Language

Essay text:

As a result, C code is suitable for many systems-programming applications that had traditionally been implemented in assembly language. Despite its low-level capabilities, the language was designed to encourage machine-independent programming. A standards-compliant and portably written C program can be compiled for a very wide variety of computer platforms and operating systems with minimal change to its source code. The language has become available on a very wide range of platforms, from embedded microcontrollers to supercomputers. Characteristics As an Algol-based language, C has the following characteristics: A procedural programming paradigm, with facilities for structured programming Lexical variable scope and recursion A static type system which prevents many meaningless operations Function parameters are generally passed by value (pass-by-reference is achieved in C by explicitly passing pointer values) Heterogeneous aggregate data types (struct in C) which allow related data elements to be combined and manipulated as a unit A small set (around 30) of reserved keywords C also has the following specific properties: Weak typing ? for instance, characters can be used as integers (similar to assembly) Low-level access to computer memory via machine addresses and typed pointers Function pointers allow for a rudimentary form of closures and runtime polymorphism Array indexing as a secondary notion, defined in terms of pointer arithmetic A standardized C preprocessor for macro definition, source code file inclusion, conditional compilation, etc...