What Is C#?

As part of the lineage of C-based languages, C# has incorporated and exploited programming language features with a proven record of success and familiarity. To that end, most syntactic features of C# are borrowed from C/C++, and most of its object-oriented concepts, such as garbage collection, reflection, the root class, and the multiple inheritance of interfaces, are inspired by Java. Improvements in C# over Java, often with syntax simplification, have been applied to iteration, properties, events, metadata, versioning, and the conversion between simple types and objects.

 

In addition to being syntactically familiar, C# is strongly typed, architecturally neutral, portable, safe, and multi-threaded. Type security in C# is supported in a number of ways, including initializing variables before their use, eliminating dangerous explicit type conversions, controlling the limits in arrays, and checking the overflow of type limits during arithmetic operations. Its architecturally neutral intermediate format, implemented as the Common Intermediate Language (CIL) and executed on a virtual machine, makes C# portable and independent aof its running environment.

C# is also safe. It controls access to hardware and memory resources, checks classes at runtime, and does not allow the implicit usage and manipulation of pointers (as C/C++ do). The explicit use of pointers, on the other hand, is restricted to sections of code that have been designated as unsafe. With the support of a garbage collector, frustrating memory leaks and dangling pointers are a non-issue. The C# language also supports multi-threading in order to promote efficient interactive applications such as graphics, input/output, and so on. Other modern features in C# include Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation from bytecode to native code, exceptions for error handling, namespaces for preventing type collisions, and documentation comments.

In order to promote the widespread use and acceptance of C#, Microsoft relinquished its proprietary rights. With the support of Hewlett-Packard and Intel, Microsoft quickly pushed for a standardized version of C#. In December 2001, the first standard was accepted by the European Computer Manufacturer Association (ECMA). The following December, a second standard was adopted by the ECMA, and it was accepted 3 months later by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The standardization of C# has three principal benefits:

1.      To support the portability of C# applications across different hardware architectures,

2.      To foster the development of C# compilers among different manufacturers, and

3.      To encourage the emergence of high-quality software tools to support the development of C# applications.