C and the ANSI Standard
For many years, the de facto standard for the C programming language was the K&R standard because of the book The C Programming Language, written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie in 1978. However, there were many changes unofficially made to the C language that were not presented in the K&R standard.
Fearing that C might lose its portability, a group of compiler vendors and software developers petitioned the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to build a standard for the C language in 1983. ANSI approved the application and formed the X3J11 Technical Committee to work on the C standard. By the end of 1989, the committee approved the ANSI standard for the C programming language.
The ANSI standard for C enhances the K&R standard and defines a group of commonly used C functions that are expected to be found in the ANSI C standard library. Now, all C compilers have the standard library, along with some other compiler-specific functions.
This book focuses on the C functions defined in the ANSI standard, which is supported by all compiler vendors. All programs in this book can be compiled by any compilers that support the ANSI standard. If you're interested in a specific compiler, you can learn the compiler-specific functions from the compiler's reference manual.
