Even if you are new to programming you may have come across C and C++ mentioned in literature, webpages, and text books. You'll often see C/C++ written. However, it is important to realize that while C++ is based upon C they are indeed different languages, and useful in different contexts.
We are going to start by giving a brief overview of these languages and explain a bit about them. Following this we will write some experimental programs and explore how the compiler works.
Let's start by delving a bit further into C.
The C programming language has been around since 1970s and was closely tied with the development of the Unix operating system.
In 1972, the computer scientist Dennis Ritchie started the development of C in Assembly language on the PDP-11 Unix system. As we demonstrated in the previous section, Assembly language is converted to machine code, and Ritchie's C language represented another level of abstraction from the computer hardware...
