The First C Programme

Author: (Norbert) Suedland, Aalen, Germany

Since Kernighan and Ritchie ([1988KR], chapter 1.1, page 9), the first and maybe shortest C programme hello.c reads the following:

#include			<stdio.h>
main( )
{
	printf( "hello, world\n" ) ;
}

This programme demonstrates, what can be understood by international:

• A simple programme sends output to the text screen of a console.
• The first statement in a conversation is a greeting.
• The problem of Good morning, Good afternoon, and Good evening, when doing an international telephone call, here is omitted by Hello.
• The problem of capital letters in the beginning of a sentence, in this example is omitted, too.
• The output is an example, how Americans behave on telephone, if they expect a telephone call from somewhere else in the world: They use the English language.

• Command and file names have got a maximum length of 8 characters.
• Since Windows there is no guarantee, that text console programmes will run in future, too.
• The Unicode concept to represent any written culture language, is to be implemented for the C programming language, yet.

An English translation hello.English.c of this first C programme would be:

#include		<English/standard_input_and_output.header.h>
main_part( )
{
	print_formatted( "Hello, somewhere in the world!\n" ) ;
}

Here, the expression .h for header file remains as abbreviation, thus the Windows system, looking at the file name endings, will not be perturbated by this translation.