C machine independent Programming Language? C is portable . Means What?

C is NOT a Machine Independent Language. The compiled are different for different OS even written programmer are same. It create different executable binary as per OS and processor Architecture. That's why compiled C code can not be executed another machine unless OS and processor Architecture are same. There are few cross compiler which compiles the code for another machine. The cross compiler is used develop program for embedded systems. On the other hand JAVA is machine independent language. JAVA compiled code (called byte code) can be run on any machine. read less

C programming language is used to write code that will get converted to machine code [ processor instructions ]. The C compiler takes care of converting the C source code to processor specific machine code. C Compilers are specific to a Operating System and the corresponding processor architecture. With the vast variety of C compilers, it is now almost common to find a C compiler for almost any combination of Operating system and processor architecture. This helps us to write C code once, but get it easily compiled on any Operating system. Only in this sense, is C considered a machine independent Programming language. Since, the C syntax is completely independent of the processors instructions. C is considered a portable language, but in practice is not easily portable. If you write a C program on Windows platform that accepts 2 numbers and gives the sum of these 2 numbers, it can very easily be compiled on a UNIX machine without any changes to the code. This code is now called "Portable code", since it can be easily ported from one Operating system to another. This may not be true, if the C code that we wrote on a Windows machine uses libraries or functions that are specific to Windows only. Ex : C code that includes dos.h header file that is not available on UNIX. To get this code compiled on a UNIX machine, this C program should now be made to handle a scenario where dos.h may not be available on the system at compile time. So, this becomes a tough task, though not impossible. Here we see that C is not very portable like any other high level language like Java or Python, which have very simple ways of tackling such scenarios. read less

Machine independence of C is that you compile the same source code in different machines and get different assembler code specific to that type of machine. So your source code is the same. (Actually for very long programs, especially in low level ones, you may write code specific to the architecture, so it no longer becomes portable). Even in different compilers your code will behave differently if you use non-standard features. Because of that I never consider C much portable. Java is simply much much much more machine independent than C. read less