C#

C# (pronounced as see sharp) is a multi-paradigm programming language encompassing strong typing, imperative, declarative, functional, generic, object-oriented (class-based), and component-oriented programming disciplines. It was developed by Microsoft within its .NET initiative and later approved as a standard by Ecma (ECMA-334) and ISO (ISO/IEC 23270:2006). C# is one of the programming languages designed for the Common Language Infrastructure.

C# is intended to be a simple, modern, general-purpose, object-oriented programming language. Its development team is led by Anders Hejlsberg. The most recent version is C# 6.0, which was released on July 20, 2015.

The ECMA standard lists these design goals for C#:

• The language is intended to be a simple, modern, general-purpose, object-oriented programming language.
• The language, and implementations thereof, should provide support for software engineering principles such as strong type checking, array bounds checking, detection of attempts to use uninitialized variables, and automatic garbage collection. Software robustness, durability, and programmer productivity are important.
• The language is intended for use in developing software components suitable for deployment in distributed environments.
• Portability is very important for source code and programmers, especially those already familiar with C and C++.
• Support for internationalization is very important.

C# is intended to be suitable for writing applications for both hosted and embedded systems, ranging from the very large that use sophisticated operating systems, down to the very small having dedicated functions.

Although C# applications are intended to be economical with regard to memory and processing power requirements, the language was not intended to compete directly on performance and size with C or assembly language.

C# is more type safe than C++. The latter allows non-type safe pointers, whereas the former does not. For example, any C++ code can be changed so that the compiler will not detect an overrun. However, changing C++ code to prevent all violations of the type system (as is often done in C) usually produces a large performance penalty.

C# used to have a mascot called Andy (named after Anders Hejlsberg). It was retired on January 29, 2004.

C# is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language. Its development team is led by Anders Hejlsberg. The most recent version is C# 6.0, which was released on July 20, 2015.