COMPUTER PROGRAMMING 8 THE C FAMILY Answer these questions. a. Could you explain the difference between a flowchart and an algorithm? b. Have you ever programmed a computer? c. If so, what language have you used? to borrow: prendere in prestito construct: costrutto to embody: rappresentare formerly: precedentemente to handle: gestire lasting: durevole pitch: tono related: connesso, collegato to require: necessitare standalone: autonomo C is pronounced see, like the letter of the alphabet. C++ is pronounced see plus plus. C# is pronounced see sharp. The name C# was inspired by musical notation where a sharp indicates that the written note should be made a semitone higher in pitch. In the name of C++, ++ indicates that a variable should be incremented by 1. C is a general-purpose programming language initially developed by Dennis Ritchie between 1969 and 1973 at Bell Labs. Its design provides constructs that map efficiently typical machine instructions, and therefore it found lasting use in applications that had formerly been coded in assembly language, in particular system software like the Unix operating system. It is one of the most widely used programming languages and in 2016 it held the first place. Its success is due to the fact that there are very few computer architectures for which a C compiler does not exist. Many later languages have borrowed directly or indirectly from C, including C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, and Unix s C Shell in the late 1970s. The most pervasive influence on these languages has been syntactical, in fact they tend to use the recognisable expression and statement syntax of C. C++ was designed for general object-oriented programming in the days when the typical computer was a standalone machine running a command line-based user interface. It was designed and implemented by Bjarne Stroustrup at the Bell Labs in 1979. It was first named C with classes, and then renamed C++ in 1983. C++ is a general-purpose programming language with high-level and low-level capabilities. It is usually compiled and supports procedural programming, data abstraction, object-oriented programming and generic programming. C# is intended to be a simple, modern, general-purpose, object-oriented programming language. Its development team was led by Anders Hejlsberg, the inventor of Turbo Pascal, for Microsoft in 1999 with the original name of Cool. C# is one of the programming languages designed for the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI), a technical standard developed by Microsoft that allows multiple high-level languages to be used on different computer platforms. In fact, source code portability is very important, especially for those programmers already familiar with C and C++. C# is specifically designed to work in the modern environment of Windows and mouse-controlled user interfaces, networks and the Internet. Microsoft Visual C# (2010) is a programming environment used to create computer applications for the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems. It combines the C# and the .NET Framework, i.e. a set of classes that embody an abstract design for solutions to a number of related problems. Other languages with the name C include: Unified parallel C, for high-performance computing or large-scale parallel machines (2003), and Lite-C, a programming language for multimedia applications and personal computer games developed by Atari in 2007 and which combines elements of C and C++. 112 Module 3 FLOWCHARTING