In computing, C is a general-purpose computer programming language originally developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories to implement the Unix operating system.<br><br>Although C was designed for writing architecturally independent system software,it is also widely used for developing application software.<br><br>Worldwide, C is the first or second most popular language in terms of number of developer positions or publicly available code. It is widely used on many different software platforms, and there are few computer architectures for which a C compiler does not exist. C has greatly influenced many other popular programming languages, most notably C++, which originally began as an extension to C, and Java and C# which borrow C lexical conventions and operators.