Timeline before C language
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| Panini's grammar treatise |
The idea of describing the structure of language using rewriting rules can be traced back to at least the work of Pāṇini (who lived sometime between the 520 and 460 BCE).
Panini's notation to describe Sanskrit word structure is also reflected in that of Backus and has many similar properties.
It is remarkable to think that concepts which are fundamental to today's theoretical computer science should have their origin with an Indian genius around 2500 years ago!!
_____ 1960 _____
ALGOL (Algorithmic Language) is a family of imperative computer programming languages, originally developed in the mid-1950s, which greatly influenced many other languages and was the standard method for algorithm description used by the ACM in textbooks and academic sources for more than thirty years.
In the sense that most modern languages are "Algol-like", it was arguably the most successful of the four high-level programming languages with which it was roughly contemporary Fortran, Lisp, and COBOL. It gave rise to many other programming languages, including BCPL, B, Pascal, PL/I, Simula, and C. ALGOL introduced code blocks and the "begin-end" pairs for delimiting them. It was also the first language implementing nested function definitions with lexical scope. Moreover, it was the first programming language which gave detailed attention to formal language definition and through the Algol 60 Report introduced Backus–Naur Form (Pāṇini Backus form), a principal formal grammar notation for language design, important in the development of compilers.
The Backus Normal Form was discovered by John Backus; who presented a notation which is equivalent in its power to that of Pāṇini, a grammarian from India who lived sometime between the 4th and 7th century BCE. The notation has many similar properties. The name Pāṇini Backus form has also been suggested in view of the fact that the expansion Backus Normal Form may not be accurate, and that Pāṇini had independently developed a similar notation earlier.
BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language) is a procedural, imperative, and structured computer programming language designed by Martin Richards of the University of Cambridge in 1966.
Originally intended for writing compilers for other languages, BCPL is no longer in common use. However, its influence is still felt because a stripped down and syntactically changed version of BCPL, called B, was the language on which the C programming language was based. This led many C programmers to give BCPL the humorous backronym "Before C Programming Language".
BCPL was the first brace programming language, and the braces survived the syntactical changes and have become a common means of denoting program source code statements. In practice, on limited keyboards of the day, source programs often used the sequences $( and $) in place of the symbols { and }. The single-line '//' comments of BCPL, which were not adopted by C, reappeared in C++, and later in C99.
B language is a programming language developed at Bell Labs circa 1969. It is the work of Ken Thompson with Dennis Ritchie.
C language was originally developed by Dennis Ritchie between 1969 and 1973 at Bell Labs, and was used to re-implement the Unix operating system.
It has since become one of the most widely used programming languages of all time, with C compilers from various vendors available for the majority of existing computer architectures and operating systems.
C language has been standardized by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) since 1989 and subsequently by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
The Backus Normal Form was discovered by John Backus; who presented a notation which is equivalent in its power to that of Pāṇini, a grammarian from India who lived sometime between the 4th and 7th century BCE. The notation has many similar properties. The name Pāṇini Backus form has also been suggested in view of the fact that the expansion Backus Normal Form may not be accurate, and that Pāṇini had independently developed a similar notation earlier.
_____ 1966 _____
BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language) is a procedural, imperative, and structured computer programming language designed by Martin Richards of the University of Cambridge in 1966.
Originally intended for writing compilers for other languages, BCPL is no longer in common use. However, its influence is still felt because a stripped down and syntactically changed version of BCPL, called B, was the language on which the C programming language was based. This led many C programmers to give BCPL the humorous backronym "Before C Programming Language".
BCPL was the first brace programming language, and the braces survived the syntactical changes and have become a common means of denoting program source code statements. In practice, on limited keyboards of the day, source programs often used the sequences $( and $) in place of the symbols { and }. The single-line '//' comments of BCPL, which were not adopted by C, reappeared in C++, and later in C99.
_____ 1969 _____
B was derived from BCPL, and its name may be a contraction of BCPL. Thompson's coworker Dennis Ritchie speculated that the name might be based on Bon, an earlier, but unrelated, programming language that Thompson designed for use on Multics.
_____ 1972 _____
It has since become one of the most widely used programming languages of all time, with C compilers from various vendors available for the majority of existing computer architectures and operating systems.
C language has been standardized by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) since 1989 and subsequently by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
_____ 1978 _____
The version of C that it describes is commonly referred to as K&R C.
The second edition covers the later ANSI C standard (1989).
The most widely used edition C-11 is a result of last update in 2011.
