- C is a commonly used language for embedded systems due to its portability, efficiency, and conciseness. It was developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s alongside Unix. - C was designed for systems programming tasks like operating systems and compilers. It was influenced by its predecessors BCPL and B and is well-suited for direct hardware manipulation. - C uses expressions, conditional and iterative statements, functions, and other constructs to provide a structured and portable way to write low-level systems code while avoiding the complexity of assembly.