Wednesday, 14 March 2012

Program Solving With 'C', Characteristics of ‘C’ language, Translator, Assembler, Compiler, Interpreter, Testing And Debugging


The Programming language C is a general purpose computer language. It was originally created by Dennis M.Ritchie (1972) for the specific purpose of writing Operating System Software.
The developments in C have seen many evolutionary processes. A lot of new features have been added to make it more useful and powerful. This is done by borrowing good concepts from other languages, but maintaining its own good portability advantages.
The C language was derived from a language known as BCPL (B language-1960). BCPL was used to develop an operating system.
The first major use of the C language was to write an operating system called UNIX, the most popular and powerful operating system C, was not yet very popular but just after application software developer also notices this language and then this become so popular.

Characteristics of ‘C’ language:-
         
          C language possesses the features of both low level language and high level languages-

·        C language provides the facilities to do programming at register level and the registers are directly used for various operations.
·        C language is quite close to English language so easy to learn and use.
·        Various built in functions are available to perform required operations in C.
·        C language is not rigidly structured, in the manner the Pascal is.
·        Today, it is the language of choice for system programming, for the development of 4GL packages such as Foxpro, Oracle etc.
·        C language is function oriented. All additional tasks such as input and output, graphics, math computations and access to peripheral devices are placed as library functions.
·        Pointer makes C very powerful language.

Translator:-
         
          A computer will not understand any program written in a language other than its machine language. Hence the programs written in other languages must be translated into the machine language, such programs are called translator.

Assembler:-

          A Program which translators an assembly language program into a machine language program is called an assembler.

Compiler:-

          A program which translates a high level language program in to a machine language program is called a compiler. Compiler checks limits, ranges, errors etc. But its program execution time is more, and occupies a larger part of the memory. It has slow speed.
          Compiler translates hole the program at a time and is 5 to 25 times faster than an interpreter.

Interpreter:-

        An interpreter is a program which translates statements of a high level language program into machine code (low level language). It translates one statements of the program at a time. It reads one statement of a high level language program, translates it into machine code and executes it.
          An interpreter is small program a compared to compiler. It occupies less memory space, so it can be used in a smaller system which has limited memory space.


Testing And Debugging:-


          While programming there may be some error in program. Programming errors are known as bugs and the process of detecting and correcting these errors is called debugging.

         In other words testing is the process of making sure that the program performs the needed task and debugging is the process of locating and eliminating program errors, errors can be categorized in four types-



·        System Errors
·        Linking Errors
·        Run Time Errors
·        Logical Errors






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