C

[http://www.techweb.com/encyclopedia] A high-level programming language developed at Bell Labs that is able to manipulate the computer at a low level like assembly language. During the last half of the 1980s, C became the language of choice for developing commercial software. C, and its object-oriented successor C++, are used to write a huge variety of applications and almost all operating systems. There are C/C++ compilers for all major operating systems and hardware platforms. C was standardized by ANSI (X3J11 committee) and ISO in 1989.