The C[] (pronounced "see brackets") programming language is a Fortran90-like C extension. While preserving all ANSI C syntax and semantics, new powerful facilities for array processing are introduced.

The C[] programming language is aimed at producing portable, tunable and efficient code for a variety of modern platforms. In particular, systems with multilevel memory hierarchy and instruction level parallelism are supported.

Support of array-based computations is provided. The language permits to manipulate arrays as single objects. The C[] syntax offers natural form to express array-based computations which also allows compiler to fully utilize the performance potential of a target platform.

The key C[] features are:

• Access to an array as a whole as well as access to both regular and irregular segments of an array
• Variable-size (dynamic) arrays
• Variety of elementwise and reduction operators

C[] is a subset of the mpC programming language. While C[] addresses instruction level parallelism and memory hierarchy of a single-chip platform, mpC is aimed at exploiting parallelism of distributed memory architectures. Thus, mpC provides a way for comprehensive utilization of the performance potential of a target platform (for example, a network of UNIX workstations) at all levels.