The C programming language was originally developed by Dennis Ritchie of Bell Laboratories, and was designed to run on a PDP-11 with a UNIX operating system. Although it was originally intended to run under UNIX, there was a great interest in running it on the IBM PC and com- patibles, and other systems. | C Language Tutorial Version March, 1999 Original MS-DOS tutorial by Gordon Dodrill, Coronado Enterprises. Moved to Applix by Tim Ward Typed by Karen Ward C programs converted by Tim Ward and Mark Harvey with assistance from Kathy Morton for Visual Calculator Pretty printed by Eric Lindsay Applix 1616 microcomputer project Applix Pty Ltd Introduction The C programming language was originally developed by Dennis Ritchie of Bell Laboratories, and was designed to run on a PDP-11 with a UNIX operating system. Although it was originally intended to run under UNIX, there was a great interest in running it on the IBM PC and compatibles, and other systems. C is excellent for actually writing system level programs, and the entire Applix 1616/OS operating system is written in C (except for a few assembler routines). It is an excellent language for this environment because of the simplicity of expression, the compactness of the code, and the wide range of applicability. It is not a good "beginning" language because it is somewhat cryptic in nature. It allows the programmer a wide range of operations from high level down to a very low level approaching the level of assembly language. There seems to be no limit to the flexibility available. One experienced C programmer made the statement, "You can program anything in C", and the statement is well supported by my own experience with the language. Along with the resulting freedom however, you take on a great deal of responsibility. It is very easy to write a program that destroys itself due to the silly little errors that, say, a Pascal compiler will flag and call a fatal error. In C, you are very much on your own, as you will soon find. Since C is not a beginners language, I will assume you are not a beginning programmer, and I will not attempt to bore you by defining a constant and a variable. You will be expected to know these basic concepts. You will, however, not be expected to know anything of the C programming .
