ISO Updates C Standard

An anonymous reader writes "The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has published the new specifications for the C programming language. The standard is known unofficially as C1X and was published officially as ISO/IEC 9899:2011. It provides greater compatibility with the C++ language and adds new features to C (as indicated in the draft)."

Comments

First post!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, who cares about that?

Seriously, though, am I the only one who finds it strange that one has to buy copies of the standard?

Re:First post!!

[symbolset]

Actually though, most of us. Changes to the C standard are a big deal.

Re:First post!!

[dutchd00d]

Not really, a lot of books cost money. Why would this one be different?

First of all, it's not a book. It's a PDF. Second of all, the Netherlands is a member body of ISO, so I have already paid for it through my taxes. I should be able to use the fruits of ISO without additional cost (or maybe some nominal fee). Third of all, an ISO standard has the status of a law: you'd better do it this way, or else. So they're telling me the law has changed, and then charging me 300 euros to find out precisely what the new law is. I believe that's called extortion.

Re:First post!!

[bunratty]

You're not paying for just the production or distribution of the file, book, movie, music, software, or drug when you pay for those things. You're paying for the effort required to make the item in the first place. If it takes someone one year to write a book, they need to recieve much more than the cost of distributing a PDF file to make a living from writing.

move on

[OrangeTide]

Many of us gave up waiting on Microsoft for our development tools.

Re:Let's get C99 right first

[Feltope]

COBOL is king, always will be.

Solid and reliable code that works period!

Re:Let's get C99 right first

[hairyfeet]

Don't forget to use the magic uncripple settings if you do that Mr AC or you'll be tying a boat anchor to every non Intel chip that tries to run you code.

Re:Let's get C99 right first

[JDG1980]

Microsoft wants C to die. No one else is cooperating with them on this. As a result, Windows developers are stuck with worse tools for C than developers on almost any other platform. (Yes, there's MinGW, but it's a real pain and does not support many newer Windows APIs at all.)

Re:Let's get C99 right first

[kthreadd]

If your program relies on the presence of GCC extensions, you did it wrong in the first place.

Re:Can't we please let C die?

[jcr]

You have that exactly backwards. It's C+++ that should die.

-jcr

Re:Poul-Henning's take on this.

[shutdown -p now]

His complaint about _Noreturn and similar keywords is silly. First, they were there 12 years ago already, in C99 - _Bool, _Complex etc. The reason for this scheme is that if they just made noreturn a keyword, existing valid C programs that use it as identifier would become illegal. On the other hand, underscore followed by capital letter was always reserved for implementations, so no conforming program can use it already. And then you can opt into more traditionally looking keywords, implemented via #define to the underscore versions, by explicitly including the appropriate header.

WTF is "ISO C"?

[Anonymous Coward]

I spent my early years programming K&R C on Unix systems.

When the ANSI standards were ratified, ANSI took over.

But WTF is "ISO C"? With a core language whose goal is portability and efficiency, why would I want the language trying to can platform-specific implementations like threading? C is not a general purpose language -- it's power comes from tying to the kernels and platform libraries of the industry at the lowest levels possible to maximize performance.

If you don't need that maximum performance, you use C++ or another high-level language.

ANSI C is the assembler of the modern computing age, not a general purpose programming language.

Now get off my lawn!