The C Programming Language

C is a general purpose systems programming language. C deals primarily with characters , numbers and addresses. This data is combined with logical operations to make programs.

C is a very minimal language. It lacks some things one might expect out of a high level language like

• character strings

• sets

• lists

• storage allocation

• no heap or garbage collection

All of these higher level mechanisms must be explicitly called.

As a result of ANSI standardization C can be run on anything with the right processor. But the language itself is independent of any specfic architecture.

C is “simple” in the sense that it is not there to get in the way. The model that the programming language follows is that the programmer knows exactly what they want to do and how to use the constructs of the langauge to acomplish said goal.