03 24 12 02 PM Introduction to Programming and C Language Introduction In this lesson we will be discussing programming in C language In this first lesson we will cover some basic concepts such as the need for programming programming languages and how to write programs in C language The Need for Programming Computers are general purpose machines that can perform any computational task However they can only understand instructions in binary language which is a combination of 0s and 1s To communicate with a computer we need to write a sequence of instructions or a program Programs are essential for computers to perform specific tasks Programming Languages Since computers can only understand instructions in binary language we need programming languages that can translate human readable code to computer readable code Programming languages have their own set of rules syntaxes and characters which we need to learn before writing programs High level languages such as C C and Java are more understandable to humans than low level languages such as machine language and assembly language C Language C language was developed by Dennis Ritchie in 1972 at Bell Laboratories It is a high level programming language that is widely used in system programming embedded systems and operating systems C language allows for portability which means that programs written in C can run on different machines without modification The Development of C Language C language is considered the successor of B language and was developed by Ken Thompson Its main purpose was to write the kernel of the Unix operating system since the limitations of B language required a more powerful language C is a system programming language used in developing various software and operating systems such as Oracle Android web browsers and device drivers It became the most popular programming language in the 1980s and was standardized by ANSI in 1989 hence the name ANSI C How C Language Works Unlike machine level language C language needs to be converted into object code using a compiler The program is written with a c extension and is converted into an object file which contains machine level code The CPU runs the program after the linker and loader have converted it into an executable file The complete process of execution is discussed in a separate video C language can also be interpreted but the difference will be discussed in another lesson