Prerequisites

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C: The Portable Assembly Language

Dennis Ritchie created C to rewrite Unix, and accidentally gave the world its most enduring systems language.

#The Problem With Assembly

Unix was originally written in PDP-7 assembly. When Bell Labs got a PDP-11, the entire OS had to be rewritten from scratch. Dennis Ritchie’s solution: create a language high-level enough to be portable, but low-level enough to replace assembly for systems programming.

C gave programmers direct memory access via pointers while providing structured control flow, functions, and a type system. It was — and remains — the lingua franca of systems programming.

#The Legacy

Nearly every language you use today is either written in C, inspired by C’s syntax, or runs on an OS written in C. Python’s interpreter? C. The Linux kernel? C. Your browser’s JavaScript engine? C++, which is C’s direct descendant.