C

N. A hugely popular procedural programming language. C has some similarities to assembly language in terms of compactness and direct hardware access. C cross-compilers are widely available, as are skilled C programmers. See also K&R C, ISO C.

C is the lingua franca of embedded systems programming, as can be seen in these results from an October 2000 survey of Embedded Systems Programming subscribers.

History: Developed by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs in 1969 1973. The typeless BCPL and B languages, which derived from Algol, preceded it and gave it some of its features.

Further Reading: A wonderful history of the language, written by its creator, is available at http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html.

c

n. The speed of light in a vacuum: 299,792,458 meters/second. It s important to note that the length of the meter is now precisely defined by international convention as the distance light travels in 1/ c seconds.

C run time

n. Various pieces of ancillary code required to run a C program. The C run time typically consists of startup code and standard libraries.

C threads

n. A library-level threading package developed for use with Mach OS. A new C thread is created by calling cthread_fork(). Once spawned, this thread has access to the global variables of its parent and siblings. Cooperative multithreading is accomplished via calls to cthread_ yield(). See also green threads.

C#

(C sharp) N. A programming language similar to Java but invented by Microsoft. Like Java, C# is...