The New C Standard - An Economic and Cultural Commentary

Author(s) : Derek M. Jones
Pages : 1616
Last Update : August 2005

This book is suggested by Derek M. Jones

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Book excerpts:

This book is about the latest version of the C Standard, ISO/IEC 9899:1999 plus TC1 and TC2. It is structured as a detailed, systematic analysis of that entire language standard. A few higher-level themes run through all this detail, these are elaborated inside this book. This book is driven by existing developer practices, not ideal developer practices (whatever they might be). How developers use computer languages is not the only important issue; the writing of translators for them and the characteristics of the hosts on which they have to be executed are also a big influence on the language specification.

Every sentence in the C Standard appears in this book (under the section heading C99). Each of these sentences are followed by a Commentary section, and sections dealing with C90, C++, Other Languages, Common Implementations, Coding Guidelines, Example, and Usage as appropriate. A discussion of each of these sections follows.

A common complaint made about the author's discussion of C is that it centers on what the standard says, not on how particular groups of developers use the language. No apology is made for this outlook. There can be no widespread discussion about C until all the different groups of developers start using consistent terminology, which might as well be that of the standard. While it is true that the author's involvement in the C Standards' process and association with other like-minded people has resulted in a strong interest in unusual cases that rarely, if ever, occur in practice, the author promises to try to limit himself to situations that occur in practice, or at least only use the more obscure cases when they help to illuminate the meaning or intent of the C Standard.

No apologies are given for limiting the discussion of language extensions. If the reader want to learn the details of specific extensions, he should refer to his vendors' manuals.

Intended Audience:

Readers are assumed to have more than a passing familiarity with C.

There are several ways in which you might approach the material in this book, including the following:

a) You have read one or more sentences from the C Standard and want to learn more about them. In this case simply locate the appropriate C sentence in this book, read the associated commentary, and follow any applicable references.

b) You want to learn about a particular topic. This pdf is fully searchable, although the search options are not as flexible as those available in a search engine. The plan is to eventually produce separate html versions of each C sentence and its associated commentary. For the time being only the pdf is available.

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