Sunday, February 9, 2014

C standard quibbles

This article is a collection of personal quibbles regarding the ISO C standard. Expect it to be updated sporadically.

There have been three major editions of the ISO C standard:

  • C89/C90: The original ISO C standard was published in 1990, and was closely based on the 1989 ANSI C standard. The 1989 ANSI and 1990 ISO standards describe exactly the same language; ISO added some introductory material and renumbered the sections. This web page appears to be a draft of the ANSI version of the standard. The 1995 amendment added digraphs and wide character support.
  • C99: The second version was published in 1999. N1256 includes the full 1999 standard with the three Technical Corrigenda merged into it.
  • C11: The third version was published in 2011. The N1570 draft is freely available, and is very nearly identical to the released standard. (There has been one minor Technical Corrigendum.)

Subtopics (these links work on my GitHub page. TODO: Figure out how to fix that or give up and delete the links):