The first standard for C was published by ANSI. Although this document was subsequently adopted by International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and subsequent revisions published by ISO have been adopted by ANSI, the name ANSI C (rather than ISO C) is still more widely used. While some software developers use the term ISO C , others are standards body–neutral and use Standard C .
In 1983, the American National Standards Institute formed a committee, X3J11, to establish a standard specification of C. After a long and arduous process, the standard was completed in 1989 and ratified as ANSI X3.159-1989 "Programming Language C." This version of the language is often referred to as "ANSI C", or sometimes "C89" (to distinguish it from C99).
In 1990, the ANSI C standard (with a few minor modifications) was adopted by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO/IEC 9899:1990. This version is sometimes called C90. Therefore, the terms "C89" and "C90" refer to essentially the same language.
In March 2000, ANSI adopted the ISO/IEC 9899:1999 standard. This standard is commonly referred to as C99, and it is the current standard for C programming language.
ANSI C is now supported by almost all the widely used compilers. Most of the C code being written nowadays is based on ANSI C. Any program written only in standard C and without any hardware dependent assumptions is virtually guaranteed to compile correctly on any platform with a conforming C implementation. Without such precautions, most programs may compile only on a certain platform or with a particular compiler, due, for example, to the use of non-standard libraries, such as GUI libraries, or to the reliance on compiler- or platform-specific attributes such as the exact size of certain data types and byte endianness .
To mitigate the differences between K&R C and the ANSI C standard, the __STDC__
("standard c") macro can be used to split code into ANSI and K&R sections.
#if __STDC__
extern int getopt( int , char * const *, const char * ) ;
#else
extern int getopt( ) ;
#endif
It's better to use "#if __STDC__
" as above rather than "#ifdef __STDC__
" because some implementation may set __STDC__
to zero to indicate non-ANSI compliance. "#if
" will treat any identifiers that couldn't be replaced by a macro as zero (0
). Thus even if the macro "__STDC__
" is not defined to signify non-ANSI compliance, "#if
" will work as shown.
In the above example, a prototype is used in a function declaration for ANSI compliant implementations, while an obsolescent non-prototype declaration is used otherwise. Those are still ANSI-compliant as of C99 and C90, but their use is discouraged.