ANSI C document

I believe the final draft of the ISO C99 standard is available for free. If you search comp.lang.c you should find a link.

Stefan

I believe the final draft of the ISO C99 standard is available for free. If you search comp.lang.c you should find a link.

Stefan

I found an early edition of K&R to be something of a joke.

Instead, I rely upon Harbison & Steele; these guys were compiler writers who had to survey many C implementations, in the time before the ANSI effort, in order to produce their own compiler. The language can be a bit difficult, but I've only once come away from that book with unanswered questions or a lack of confidence in what I read (that one occasion dealt with some rather arcane intricacies of the macro processor).

Even that said, I'd like to have the actual standard documents.

David

I found an early edition of K&R to be something of a joke.

? What was so funny about it ?

You know, it's not exactly fair play to judge a book by its earlier editions some 14 years(!) after a heavily revised new edition came out. K&R2 is still the single most important book on C, as a programming language, rather than a particular implementation of that language.

Nowadays, it may be a possibility to use H&S and a copy of the actual standard (C90 with all the addenda, a.k.a. C95) instead, but that's only because the price of the standard document has dropped by an order of magnitude recently, so it's now affordable on a non-institutional budget.

What was so funny about it ?

Not speaking for David, but there is nothing "funny" about K&R. Perhaps closer to the point is that, although K&R is the "popular choice", for those who travel in the almost-a-language-lawyer circles, H&S is generally more highly regarded than K&R on the basis of dealing with the nitty-gritties that K&R does not touch upon, among other reasons.

The draft might still be available but it is inaccurate as there were changes between the final public draft and the issued standard