A History of Language

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By courtesy of the author, also at Ritchie, Dennis M. "Chistory". www.bell-labs.com . Retrieved March 29, 2022. Revelationist: Language was gifted to humans by God, and it was thus God—and not humans—who named everything. While C does not include certain features found in other languages (such as object orientation and garbage collection), these can be implemented or emulated, often through the use of external libraries (e.g., the GLib Object System or the Boehm garbage collector).

functions returning struct or union types (previously only a single pointer, integer or float could be returned) In The Mental and Social Life of Babies, psychologist Kenneth Kaye noted that no usable adult language could have evolved without interactive communication between very young children and adults. "No symbolic system could have survived from one generation to the next if it could not have been easily acquired by young children under their normal conditions of social life." [114] From-where-to-what theory [ edit ] An illustration of the "from where to what" model of language evolution Even after the publication of the 1989 ANSI standard, for many years K&R C was still considered the " lowest common denominator" to which C programmers restricted themselves when maximum portability was desired, since many older compilers were still in use, and because carefully written K&R C code can be legal Standard C as well. According to a study investigating the song differences between white-rumped munias and its domesticated counterpart ( Bengalese finch), the wild munias use a highly stereotyped song sequence, whereas the domesticated ones sing a highly unconstrained song. In wild finches, song syntax is subject to female preference— sexual selection—and remains relatively fixed. However, in the Bengalese finch, natural selection is replaced by breeding, in this case for colourful plumage, and thus, decoupled from selective pressures, stereotyped song syntax is allowed to drift. It is replaced, supposedly within 1000 generations, by a variable and learned sequence. Wild finches, moreover, are thought incapable of learning song sequences from other finches. [147] In the field of bird vocalisation, brains capable of producing only an innate sISO/IEC 9899:201x (ISO C11) Committee Draft" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on December 22, 2017 . Retrieved September 16, 2011. The language does not directly support object orientation, introspection, run-time expression evaluation, generics, etc. Yo-he-ho. The yo-he-ho theory claims language emerged from collective rhythmic labor, the attempt to synchronize muscular effort resulting in sounds such as heave alternating with sounds such as ho. C89 is supported by current C compilers, and most modern C code is based on it. Any program written only in Standard C and without any hardware-dependent assumptions will run correctly on any platform with a conforming C implementation, within its resource limits. Without such precautions, programs may compile only on a certain platform or with a particular compiler, due, for example, to the use of non-standard libraries, such as GUI libraries, or to a reliance on compiler- or platform-specific attributes such as the exact size of data types and byte endianness.

The C++ programming language (originally named "C with Classes") was devised by Bjarne Stroustrup as an approach to providing object-oriented functionality with a C-like syntax. [64] C++ adds greater typing strength, scoping, and other tools useful in object-oriented programming, and permits generic programming via templates. Nearly a superset of C, C++ now [ when?] supports most of C, with a few exceptions. The first perspective that language evolved from the calls of human ancestors seems logical because both humans and animals make sounds or cries. One evolutionary reason to refute this is that, anatomically, the centre that controls calls in monkeys and other animals is located in a completely different part of the brain than in humans. In monkeys, this centre is located in the depths of the brain related to emotions. In the human system, it is located in an area unrelated to emotion. Humans can communicate simply to communicate—without emotions. So, anatomically, this scenario does not work. [92] This suggests that language was derived from gesture [93](humans communicated by gesture first and sound was attached later). In 1983, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) formed a committee, X3J11, to establish a standard specification of C. X3J11 based the C standard on the Unix implementation; however, the non-portable portion of the Unix C library was handed off to the IEEE working group 1003 to become the basis for the 1988 POSIX standard. In 1989, the C standard was ratified as ANSI X3.159-1989 "Programming Language C". This version of the language is often referred to as ANSI C, Standard C, or sometimes C89. Harbison, Samuel; Steele, Guy Jr. (2002). C: A Reference Manual (5ed.). Pearson. ISBN 978-0130895929. (archive)A successor to the programming language B, C was originally developed at Bell Labs by Ritchie between 1972 and 1973 to construct utilities running on Unix. It was applied to re-implementing the kernel of the Unix operating system. [8] During the 1980s, C gradually gained popularity. It has become one of the most widely used programming languages, [9] [10] with C compilers available for practically all modern computer architectures and operating systems. The book The C Programming Language, co-authored by the original language designer, served for many years as the de facto standard for the language. [11] [12] C has been standardized since 1989 by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Platform hardware can be accessed with pointers and type punning, so system-specific features (e.g. Control/Status Registers, I/O registers) can be configured and used with code written in C – it interacts well with the platform it is running on. Nonhuman primates can use gestures or symbols for at least primitive communication, and some of their gestures resemble those of humans, such as the "begging posture", with the hands stretched out, which humans share with chimpanzees. [85] [86]

The language supports a rich set of operators, including bit manipulation, for integer arithmetic and logic, and perhaps different sizes of floating point numbers – it can process appropriately-structured data effectively. enumerated types (previously, preprocessor definitions for integer fixed values were used, e.g. #define GREEN 3) C has direct control over memory allocation and deallocation, which gives reasonable efficiency and predictable timing to memory-handling operations, without any concerns for sporadic stop-the-world garbage collection events – it has predictable performance. The important question for gestural theories is why there was a shift to vocalization. Various explanations have been proposed:

Critics of gestural theory note that it is difficult to name serious reasons why the initial pitch-based vocal communication (which is present in primates) would be abandoned in favor of the much less effective non-vocal, gestural communication. [100] However, Michael Corballis has pointed out that it is supposed that primate vocal communication (such as alarm calls) cannot be controlled consciously, unlike hand movement, and thus it is not credible as precursor to human language; primate vocalization is rather homologous to and continued in involuntary reflexes (connected with basic human emotions) such as screams or laughter (the fact that these can be faked does not disprove the fact that genuine involuntary responses to fear or surprise exist). [93] Also, gesture is not generally less effective, and depending on the situation can even be advantageous, for example in a loud environment or where it is important to be silent, such as on a hunt. Other challenges to the "gesture-first" theory have been presented by researchers in psycholinguistics, including David McNeill. [101] Tool-use associated sound in the evolution of language [ edit ] The use of pointers and the run-time manipulation of these means there may be two ways to access the same data (aliasing), which is not determinable at compile time. This means that some optimisations that may be available to other languages are not possible in C. FORTRAN is considered faster. C - the mother of all languages". ICT Academy at IITK. November 13, 2018. Archived from the original on May 31, 2021 . Retrieved October 11, 2022. In 1971, Ritchie started to improve B, to utilise the features of the more-powerful PDP-11. A significant addition was a character data type. He called this New B (NB). [16] Thompson started to use NB to write the Unix kernel, and his requirements shaped the direction of the language development. [16] [17] Through to 1972, richer types were added to the NB language: NB had arrays of int and char. Pointers, the ability to generate pointers to other types, arrays of all types, and types to be returned from functions were all also added. Arrays within expressions became pointers. A new compiler was written, and the language was renamed C. [8] To focus on mental states is to accept fictions—inhabitants of the imagination—as potentially informative and interesting. An example is metaphor: a metaphor is, literally, a false statement. [142] In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo declares "Juliet is the sun!". Juliet is a woman, not a ball of plasma in the sky, but human listeners are not (or not usually) pedants insistent on point-by-point factual accuracy. They want to know what the speaker has in mind. Grammaticalisation is essentially based on metaphor. To outlaw its use would be to stop grammar from evolving and, by the same token, to exclude all possibility of expressing abstract thought. [138] [143]