C language is a general purpose and structured pragramming langauge developed by 'Dennis Ritchie' at AT &T's Bell Laboratories in the 1972s in USA.
It is also called as 'Procedure oriented programming language.'
C is not specially designed for specific applications areas like COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) or FORTRAN (Formula Translation). It is well suited for business and scietific applications. It has some various features like control structures, looping statements, arrays, macros required for these applications.
The C language has following numerous features as :

• Portability
• Flexibility
• Effectiveness and efficiency
• Reliability
• Interactivity

Execution of C Program :

 C program executes in following 4 (four steps).

 

1. Creating a program :
An editor like notepad or wordpad is used to create a C program. This file contains a source code which consists of executable code. The file should be saved as 'filename.c' extension only.

2. Compiling the program :
The next step is to compile the program. The code is compiled by using compiler. Compiler converts code to binary code i.e. object code.

3. Linking a program to library :
The object code of a program is linked with libraries that are needed for execution of a program. The linker is used to link the program with libraries. It creates a file with '*.exe' extension.

4. Execution of program :
The final executable file is then run by dos command prompt or by any other software.