HP C originates from the C language designed in
1972 by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Laboratories. It descended from several
ALGOL-like languages, most notably BCPL and a language developed
by Ken Thompson called B.
C has been called a low-level, high-level programming
language. C's operators and data types closely match those found
in modern computers. The language is concise and C compilers produce
highly efficient code. C has traditionally been used for systems
programming, but it is being used increasingly for general applications.
The most important feature that C provides is portability.
In addition, C provides many facilities such as useful data types,
including pointers and strings, and a functional set of data structures,
operators, and control statements.
