HP C A.06.05 Reference Manual

Chapter 1 1
1 What is HP C?
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.