C language used in materials engineering?

StatBeast1
Wed, 09 Jan 2013 22:08:11 +0000

If you know Java, it is very, very similar to C++ (one might argue that Java is a bit more modern or natural as an object oriented language). C++ is a library extension of C to include object oriented structure. So if you know one of those languages, you can “learn” any of the others in a matter of days (hours?). It’s true.
One advantage of C is that it has really compact compilers and ran very fast, so it was traditionally used in embedded programming, for instance with computer controlled machines, etc. For those sorts of applications it replaced assembly language programming (making a couple of the computer languages I know essentially obsolete )
Also, a lot of high level (interpreted) languages such as R or MATLAB allow you to compile code that is a bottleneck, the usual languages for that purpose are C or Fortran (sometime C++). I use C a lot for code that has to be fast but is called by other languages.