Yep, we’re always on the cutting edge of the latest news and breaking developments here Under The Bridge, so today we’re going to talk about — wait for it — the C99 standard for the C programming language!
Um, you may understandably be thinking, how does ISO/IEC 9899:1999, published 1999-12-01, qualify as a breaking development now exactly?
Well, grasshopper, it’s a breaking development because it has recently come to public light on the xcode-users list that recent versions of Xcode have changed the default C language dialect to C99, apparently deciding that GCC 4.0’s C99 feature support can now be deemed complete. So that means that if you’re using Xcode to target Any New Device Currently Under NDA™, it would behoove you to clue into just what’s changed and different in this “new” version of C. And, conveniently, this fine fellow David Hoerl has put together a reading list for us:
It took a while but I finally did uncover a really good series of articles written by Randy Meyers for the C/C++ Users Journal several years ago. Posting these here in case you have been thinking of doing the same in the near future:
The New C: It All Began with FORTRAN
The New C: Declarations & Initializations
The New C: Why Variable Length Arrays
The New C: Variable Length Arrays, Part 2
The New C: Variable Length Arrays, Part 3
The New C: Variable Length Arrays, Part 4
And if you’re not satisfied by all that, there is also available The New C Standard: An Economic and Cultural Commentary, a 1615-page book which annotates the entire standard, sentence by sentence. And it’s completely free, as Addison-Wesley backed out of publishing it once they got a look at it. Probably not a wholly indefensible decision on their part, as it’s not exactly what most people would consider a gripping page-turner, but it is remarkably exhaustive in its coverage.
h/t: xcode-users!
