|
Department of Engineering |
|
|
Next: Converting to ANSI C
Up: ANSI C for Programmers
Previous: Signals and error handling
Contents
In 1983, the American National Standards Institute commissioned a
committee, X3J11, to standardize the C language. After a long,
arduous process, including several widespread public reviews, the
committee's work was finally ratified as an American National
Standard, X3.159-1989, on December 14, 1989, and published in the
spring of 1990. For the most part, ANSI C standardizes existing
practice, with a few additions from C++ (most notably function
prototypes) and support for multinational character sets (including
the much-lambasted trigraph sequences). The ANSI C standard also
formalizes the C run-time library support functions.
The published Standard includes a ``Rationale," which explains many
of its decisions, and discusses a number of subtle points,
including several of those covered here. (The Rationale is ``not
part of ANSI Standard X3.159-1989, but is included for information
only.")
The Standard has been adopted as an international standard, ISO/IEC
9899:1990, although the Rationale is currently not included.
Subsections
Next: Converting to ANSI C
Up: ANSI C for Programmers
Previous: Signals and error handling
Contents
Tim Love
2010-04-27