Small number of keywords
Widely available, particularly on personal
computers and workstations
Can be used very portably
Standard library
Preprocessor may be used to isolate machine
dependent code
Unlike Pascal, which has many dialects
Native language of UNIX (tm) and Windows NT
Terse
Powerful set of operators
Statements can be very powerful
Some are bit level operators
Designed to be implemented efficiently on
many machines
Modular -- functions
Parameters are typically passed `by value’
No nested functions
Syntax is complicated
Semantics of certain features are complex and error-prone