ABSTRACT
The C language was developed at Bell Labs in the early 1970s by Dennis Richie and others. At that time, the Unix operating system, also developed at Bell Labs, was written in assembly language. Programs written in assembly are usually hard to debug, maintain, and enhance, and Unix was no exception. The C language continued to evolve during the 1970s, and since then, it has been used by thousands of programmers for a wide variety of applications. The need for the standardization of C language became apparent. In 1983, the American National Standard Institute (ANSI) began the development of the C standard that was completed and formally approved, in 1989, as ANSI C or Standard C. In 1990, the ANSI C standard was adopted by the International Standards Organization (ISO) as ISO/IEC 9899:1990. This standard describes precisely the features, characteristics, and properties of the C language, and every C compiler must support it.
