Note: 'Alpha' module
C appeared in 1972, making it much older than the other languages on this site, which came out in the early 1990's. C is so close to the actual hardware that some call it a 'portable assembly language'. This gives it very fast performance, but it doesn't provide many of the features of modern languages, such as:
- Classes and Objects
- Fully Automatic Memory Management
- Strong Type Checking
C is still used heavily when performance is important, such as for operating systems or implementing other languages.
C++ adds some features to C, but is not covered in this module. However, since C++ is basically a superset of C, the challenges provide one language option for both C and C++. The boilerplate code may also include some of C++'s I/O functions. (See LearnC++InYMinutes for example C++ code.)