Section 11.1. The C Language

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11.1. The C Language

The C language can be found in two main forms: K&R C and ANSI C. K&R, named for the authors of the first popular C programming text, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, defines the C language as it was in the early days of UNIX. Some now refer to this as "Classic C." The American National Standards Institute defined a C standard of their own, adding some useful features and defining exact syntax for existing but not well-defined features. Most compilers support both standards.

Before we get into any source code, I'd like to make an important point: the source code in this book does not conform to the ANSI C standard. While ANSI C contains several nice syntactic and type-checking facilities that encourage maintainable and readable programs, I did not use these features because many major corporations and universities still use K&R C. In order to make my source code as portable and useful as possible, I tailored the code to the most reasonable lowest common denominator.