C was originally developed in the 1970s by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs. It is a high-level, general-purpose programming language that contains features allowing it to be used for both system and application programming. The C language consists of characters, numbers, and symbols that form tokens like identifiers, keywords, constants, operators, and punctuation. Variables, functions, and other elements in C are given unique identifiers to represent storage areas that can be manipulated. Constants are values that cannot be altered, and different types of constants like integers, floats, characters, and strings are used. Operators perform operations on values and variables, and different classes of operators exist for arithmetic, assignment, comparison, logic, and other purposes.