C

C is a general-purpose, imperative programming language created by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs in 1972. It was designed for writing the Unix operating system, and its influence on subsequent language design is difficult to overstate: C is the ancestor of C++, Objective-C, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, and Rust, and its syntax — curly braces, semicolon terminators, prefix type declarations — became the visual vocabulary of modern programming. But C is more than a historical ancestor. It is the lingua franca of systems programming, the default language for operating systems, embedded devices, compilers, and anything that must speak directly to hardware.

The C Memory Model

C provides a deliberately thin abstraction over the underlying machine. The programmer has direct access to memory through pointers, can cast between types with minimal restriction, and must manually manage memory allocation and deallocation through `malloc` and `free`. This transparency is C\s