The Existing Standard

The Approved Standards for The C Programming Language are:

ISO/IEC 9899:1990 Programming Languages -- C. Available from ANSI for $200. ANSI originally adopted X3.159 as the U.S. standard. ISO/IEC 9899:1990 is equivalent, but with additional chapters to satisfy the international requirements of ISO.
ISO/IEC 9899/AMD1:1995, Amendment 1 to ISO/IEC 9899:1990 C Integrity. Available from ANSI for $120.
ISO/IEC 9899 TCOR1 Technical Corrigendum 1 was approved in 1995.
ISO/IEC 9899 TCOR2 Technical Corrigendum 2 was published in 1996.

C9X

ISO/IEC is currently working on the next standard C9X. JTC1/SC22/WG14 - C has made the Final Committee Draft FCD1 aka CD2 available for public review, as well as the rationale for C9X.

The committees responsible for the standardization of The C Programming Language are:

JTC1 ISO / IEC Joint Technical Committee 1, Information Technology
JTC 1 / SC 22 Programming languages, their environments and system software interfaces
JTC1/SC22/WG14 - C Responsible for the technical development of the standard for C programming language.
JTC 1 TAG US Technical Advisory Group to JTC1
Technical Committee J11 U.S. TAG to ISO/IEC JTC 1 SC22/WG14
JTC1/SC22/WG14 is the international standardization working group for the programming language C.

The organizations involved in the standardization of The C Programming Language are:

ANSI American National Standards Institute
ISO International Organization for Standardization
IEC International Electrotechnical Commission

Other standardization information

The C Programming Language

comp.lang.c FAQ
Online C run-time library reference
Programming in C Links to the classics on C culture, history, and literature. Their list of C resources includes pointers to the holy Ten Commandments for C Programmers, the irreverant God vs. K&R, the irrelevant (but fun) C Infrequently Asked Questions list, and the infamous (and really long) erratta on Herbert Schildt's awful The Annotated ANSI C Standard.

Interesting People

Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken Thompson created The C Programming Language and UNIX. Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie wrote The C Programming Language, the early definition of the language.
Clive Feather is an active member of the UK panel on C. He has presented over 50 papers to WG14.

Last updated April 2, 1999

Return to the top of this page
Return to Home Page

Have a question or comment or just want to get in touch? E-mail me at stevieo4@erols.com