c

c or C (siː)
—n , pl c's, C's, Cs
1.	the third letter and second consonant of the modern English alphabet
2.	a speech sound represented by this letter, in English usually either a voiceless alveolar fricative, as in cigar, or a voiceless velar stop, as in case
3.	the third in a series, esp the third highest grade in an examination
4.	a.  something shaped like a C
	b.  (in combination): a C-spring
C or C
—n

C

as the proper one for gamma. To restore a dedicated symbol for the "g" sound, a modified gamma was introduced c.250 B.C.E. as G. In classical Latin -c- has only the value "k," and thus it passed to Celtic and, via Irish monks, to Anglo-Saxon, where -k- was known but little used. In O.Fr., many "k" sounds drifted to "ts" and by 13c., "s," but still were written with a -c-. Thus the 1066 invasion brought to the Eng. language a more vigorous use of -k- and a flood of Fr. and L. words in which -c- represented "s" (e.g. cease, ceiling, circle). By 15c. native English words with -s- were being respelled with -c- for "s" (e.g. ice, mice, lice). In some words from Italian, meanwhile, the -c- has a "ch" sound (a sound evolution in Italian that parallels the O.Fr. one).

c abbr.

1. blood capillary

2. small calorie

c   The symbol for the speed of light in a vacuum.

C

n.
1. The third letter of the English alphabet.
2. ASCII 1000011.
3. The name of a programming language designed by Dennis Ritchie during the early 1970s and immediately used to reimplement Unix; so called because many features derived from an earlier compiler named `B' in commemoration of _its_ parent, BCPL. (BCPL was in turn descended from an earlier Algol-derived language, CPL.) Before Bjarne Stroustrup settled the question by designing C++, there was a humorous debate over whether C's successor should be named `D' or `P'. C became immensely popular outside Bell Labs after about 1980 and is now the dominant language in systems and microcomputer applications programming. See also languages of choice, indent style.

C is often described, with a mixture of fondness and disdain varying according to the speaker, as "a language that combines all the elegance and power of assembly language with all the readability and maintainability of assembly language".

C definition

language
A programming language designed by Dennis Ritchie at AT&T Bell Labs ca. 1972 for systems programming on the PDP-11 and immediately used to reimplement Unix.
It was called "C" because many features derived from an earlier compiler named "B". In fact, C was briefly named "NB". B was itself strongly influenced by BCPL. Before Bjarne Stroustrup settled the question by designing C++, there was a humorous debate over whether C's successor should be named "D" or "P" (following B and C in "BCPL").
C is terse, low-level and permissive. It has a macro preprocessor, cpp.
Partly due to its distribution with Unix, C became immensely popular outside Bell Labs after about 1980 and is now the dominant language in systems and microcomputer applications programming. It has grown popular due to its simplicity, efficiency, and flexibility. C programs are often easily adapted to new environments.
C is often described, with a mixture of fondness and disdain, as "a language that combines all the elegance and power of assembly language with all the readability and maintainability of assembly language".
Ritchie's original C, known as K&R C after Kernighan and Ritchie's book, has been standardised (and simultaneously modified) as ANSI C.
See also ACCU, ae, c68, c386, C-Interp, cxref, dbx, dsp56k-gcc, dsp56165-gcc, gc, GCT, GNU C, GNU superoptimiser, Harvest C, malloc, mpl, Pthreads, ups.
[Jargon File]
(1996-06-01)

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