The most common modern systems *(programming language) to date, by _(Brian Kernighan) and _(Dennis M. Ritchie) (K&R). It's _(low-level), and the typing is rather weak. It was designed in the late '70s as a portable assembler for the PDP series (nominally compatible machines but with various word lengths), and it is still the state of the art in that area, although, as a systems programming language, it is more adapted to the PDP-11 than to modern architectures.

In the late '80s, the small and elegant `K&R' C became the prey of an ANSI standards commitee; it is now ANSI Standard C. 

Many people build typing systems on top of C. _(C++) was at first an extensions of C via a cfront preprocessors/code generator. _(Objective-C) is derived from the GCC C compiler front end via the GCC _(abstract syntax tree) interface.

It is very typical in C to create function pointers, and tables of function pointers to build OO concepts. The GNOME Glib for example builds an object layer on top of C with many interfaces to other languages. Objective-C and C++ solidify the layout of these structures without changing the underlying language drastically.

_(C#) and _(Java) are more distant relatives of C that give you many more user definable types and other advanced language features are and somewhat backwards compatible.

Via the GCC _(abstract syntax tree) it is possible to do full extension to C like languages and inject _(meta-level) code.

In the '80s, C (in our opinion wrongly) became the language of choice for general purpose programming. C offers absolutely no particular interest when cut from all its standard compilers and libraries, since you can no longer port existing software. As TUNES won't support any standard C library (at least as support for native code), and requires a different compiler anyway, because its semantics is so much different, C offers no interest on top of TUNES. Thus, C just has nothing to do with TUNES, except perhaps as a layer between TUNES and a _(POSIX) compliant system, if TUNES is to be implemented as an application under such system (see the _(OTOP|TUNES On Top of POSIX) subproject). 

The C language family:
/("C language" :attribute :topic :match :exact)

<ul class="links">
<li>_("C9X"|http://wwwold.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC22/WG14/docs/c9x/) the ISO standard for C.</li>
<li>_("C Standard Questions"|http://home.tiscalinet.ch/t_wolf/tw/c/index.html).</li>
<li>_("Programming in C"|http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/Dave/C/) an online tutorial by Dave Marshall.</li>
<li>_("Programming Style"|http://www.fermigier.com/fermigier/style.html.en) a collection of links about C and C++.</li>
<li>_("Splint"|http://lclint.cs.virginia.edu/) if you must code in such an unsafe language, we strongly recommend you ensure the type safety of your programs.</li>
<li>_("the WIKIPedia entry for C"|http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_language).</li>
</ul>

<ul class="implementations">
<li>_("GCC"|http://gcc.gnu.org): the famous GNU Compiler Collection, formerly the GNU C Compiler.</li>
<li>_("LCC"|http://www.cs.princeton.edu/software/lcc/): a simpler alternative to GCC.</li>
<li>_("Jutta Degener's Page on Programming in C"|http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/).</li>
<li>_("The Intel C++ Compiler"|http://www.intel.com/software/products/compilers/c60l/index.htm): known to produce faster binaries than GCC.</li>
</ul>

