HISTORY

  As most high level languages even C was derived from ALGOL. ALGOL was introduced in early 1960’s and it was followed by Martin Richard’s BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language) in 1967, and then next was Ken Thompson’s B in 1970 and here comes Dennis Ritchie’s C in 1972. It was mostly used on UNIX operating system. But later a book “The C Programming Language” by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie popularized C. The 1972 version is known as Traditional C. It was standardized in 1989 and named it C89 and later minor updates were made to it in the year 1999 and was named C99.

  The significant changes incorporated into the standard are
1) Extensions to the character type to support non-English characters
2) A Boolean type
3) Extensions to the integer type
4) Inclusion of type definitions in the for statement.
5) Addition of imaginary and complex types.
6) Incorporation of the C++ style comment(double slash)


IMPORTANT DATES:
 

Language or Related Updates	Introduced in the year	By	Description
ALGOL	Early 1960s		The root of all modern languages.
BCPL	1967	Martin Richards	BCPL- Basic Combined Programming Language. Used primarily for writing system software.
B	1970	Ken Thompson	Originated from BCPL. Used to create early versions of UNIX
C (also called traditional C)	1972	Dennis Ritchie	Developed at Bell Laboratories. Evolved from ALGOL, BCPL and B
BOOK “The C Programming Language”	1978	Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie	A book about the C programming Language.
C89 (Standardized)	1989	ANSI	Adopted by ISO in December 1990
C99	1999	ISO	Few significant updates to standard and named it as C99
C11	2011	ISO	ISO/IEC 9899:2011