Introduction to C language - I

All of us have the mother tongue by default. If you are from North India most probably your mother tongue could be Hindi. If you come to South India where you will find lots of regional languages such as Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and Tamil etc. Then it is very difficult to converse with the local people who knows their mother tongue how will we converse with them? We usually take the help of global language English in the big cities like Bangalore.

As the same way computer can only understand the 'on' and 'off' language that is called machine level language. It contains only '0' (zero) and '1' that is called binary language.

C is a programming language. The C language was first developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at AT&T Bell Labs. Ritchie called his newly developed language C simply because there was a B programming language already.

C is one of the high level language.Each high-level language needs a compiler or an interpreter to translate instructions written in the high-level programming language into a machine language that a computer can understand and execute. Different machines may need different compilers or interpreters for the same programming language.

A computer program written in a high-level language, such as C, Java, or Perl, is just a text file, consisting of English-like characters and words. We have to use some special programs, called compilers or interpreters, to translate such a program into a machine-readable code. That is, the text format of all instructions written in a high-level language has to be converted into the binary format. The code obtained after the translation is called binary code. Prior to the translation, a program in text format is called source code.

The smallest unit of the binary code is called a bit (from binary digit), which can have a value of 0 or 1. 8 bits make up one byte, and half a byte (4 bits) is one nibble.