C is a general-purpose programming language with features economy of expression, modern flow control and data structures, and a rich set of operators. C is not a ``very high level'' language, nor a ``big''one, and is not specialized to any particular area of application. But its absence of restrictions and its generality make it more convenient and effective for many tasks than supposedly more powerful languages.

C was originally designed for and implemented on the UNIX operating system on the DEC PDP-11, by Dennis Ritchie. The operating system, the C compiler, and essentially all UNIX applications programs (including all of the software used to prepare this book) are written in C. Production compilers also exist for several other machines, including the IBM System/370, the Honeywell 6000, and the Interdata 8/32. C is not tied to any particular hardware or system, however, and it is easy to write programs that will run without change on any machine that supports C.

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The precursors of object-oriented programming can be traced back to the late 1960's: Classes, inheritance and virtual member functions were integral features of Simula67, a programming language that was mainly used for writing event-driven simulations. When Smalltalk first appeared back in 1972, it offered a pure object-oriented programming environment. In fact, Smalltalk defined object-oriented programming. This style of programming was so innovative and revolutionary at the time that it took more than a decade for it to become a standard in the software industry. Undoubtedly, the emergence of C++ in the early '80s provided the most considerable contribution to this revolution.

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A book is a massive undertaking, one that we would never be able to complete without help from our all our friends, old and new. We're proud to count among our old friends the team at Addison-wesley: Mike Hendrickson, John Fuller, the ever-helpful Julie Steele, and the wonderful Julie DiNicola. Thank you all.

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Why Tcl? Is it just another shell language? How can it help you? Tcl stands for Tool Command Language. Tcl is really two things: a scripting language, and an interpreter for that language that is designed to be easy to embed into your application. Tcl and its associated X windows toolkit, Tk, were designed and crafted by Prof. John Ousterhout of U.C. Berkeley. These packages can be picked up off the Internet (see below) and used in your application, even a commercial one. The interpreter has been ported from UNIX to DOS and Macintosh environments.

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