C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system.
Although C was designed for implementing system software, it is also widely used for developing portable application software.[citation needed]
C is one of the most popular programming languages. 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.