A programming language called C: The C programming language is claimed to be compact, efficient, and expressive, to the point of supplanting assembly language on Unix

C is a general-purpose programming language developed by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Laboratories in 1972. Since then, it has become a major language not only at Bell Labs but also throughout the world. C was originally developed for use with the Unix [a trademark of Bell Labs] operating system, which is largely written in C, so part of the success of the language is due to the acceptance of Unix. C, however, has spread far beyond Unix systems in the past few years, and a booming compiler industry has sprung up around it. C was originally designed for “systems programming,” that is, for writing programs like compilers, operating systems, and text editors. It has proven satisfactory for other applications as well, including data base systems, telephone switching systems, numerical analysis, engineering programs, and a great deal of text-processing software.