Lang-Intro

What You Need to Know About C

You may want to read this in tandem with our article Compiling and Running C and C++

C was designed in the early 1970s at Bell Labs for the purpose of writing software for UNIX, including its kernel. It is known for being low level, very close to the hardware. Anything you can do on a computer, you can do in C! It is also a rather simple language, in that once you learn its rules, you can pretty much figure out what any piece of software written in C does. It is not going to do anything funny behind your back, as many modern languages do.