Are there any Free C Standard Documents ?

[Richard Bos]

If it's nonsense, demonstrate that it is. I don't care how much money you
make nor how good of a programmer you are. You're WRONG to deny people
with lesser means requisite information. Requisite was the very term you
use. So, you're contradicting yourself if you signify that there is
something essential & necessary in the standard & then spin around & imply
that there isn't.

Learn to read.

To begin with, _someone_ snipped all attributions but the top one, but
if you'd paid attention you'd have seen that Randy Howard introduced the
term "requisite information", while you're now replying to Alan Balmer.
Yes, this is a newsgroup, not an e-mail conversation.
Second, Randy was talking about requisite information _for a job_. If
the job requires having access to the Standard, I'd certainly expect the
employer to either provide that Standard, or to pay enough that the
employee can buy it, whether they are in India or not. It has nothing to
do with the wealth of the country, and everything with whether the
employer wants to get the job done or not. If the Standard is _not_
requisite, such payment is not a given. And since the OP is a student,
there is no payment, but the last public draft is sufficient, and the
Standard itself is not "requisite information" in the first place.

FWIW, I myself made do with that very draft until Wiley published their
book, and I'm not a student but an employed programmer - although, to be
fair, not one whose primary on-the-job language is C. Proof enough that
not _all_ jobs require the Standard itself. Even now, I bought the book
myself, because I want it, not because my job demands it.

Richard

 

[Randy Howard]

Oh come on. You guys are silly. Obviously, somebody who has a copy of the
standard has a clear advantage over those who don't.

I couldn't disagree more. I see almost no reason why a university student
has to have one. The odds are that ZERO of their professors even have a
copy of it, or be expecting a student to have read it.

& obviously, for those around here who like to play language lawyer, this
is part of that game of being one.

Sure. Being a language lawyer on c.l.c has never shown up in any job
description I have read however. As I said before, I have never actually
met a "real person" that owned a copy of it, and I have worked with at
least a hundred different programmers who were all paid, at least in part
if not exclusively, to write code in C.

 

[kal]

You just got through saying that they should "find a job in which the
requisite information reflects a smaller percentage of their take home
pay". Well, how is somebody going to do a job without the requisite
information? You have to have the later before you can do the former.
IOW, you're putting the cart before the horse! Obviously, you would rather
not have this competition, but what are you going to do about it?

What competition? The third world "software industry" is
somewhat like the .COM boom of yore. It will take some time
for things to settle down but in the end it will go bust.

Make more specious arguments?

There is nothing specious about asking someone not to steal.

The bottom line is 740 USD is a lot less than +60000 USD.

+60000 USD per month? Now, where are THEM jobs?

 

[Nitin Bhardwaj]

To the OP:

C89: http://cern.ch/dan.pop/ansi.c
C99: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n869/

Dan

Thanks Dan for the URLs.
I have got both the Old and new Drafts now.

Well I knew that these ANSI documents are not available ( from
ANSI/ISO ) freely and I had also searched here on the sites of Bureau
of Indian Standards (BIS ),and also at local bookstores of
Prentice-Hall and Addison-Wesley - they also didn't had it.

Well I had observed in c.l.c that most people augment their arguments
by citing the sectiion number & paragraphs from either the C89 or
C99..so I thought maybe I was missing this document terribly.

As far as my C goes, I have been studying it for the last 5 years now
( 2 in my graduation & 3 in my on-going PG ) and talking about books
here in South Asia - man they really cheap. Publishers like PH and AWL
have come-out with cheap editions of almost all CS book-- I remember
when I first bought K&R2, it cost me Rs.90 ( roughly USD 1.8 ) and the
C-FAQ book by Steve Summit cost me USD 4.95

Thanks for all your help guys and understanding my position.

 

[Nitin Bhardwaj]

And imagine...Those are just the one percent rich who give the
expensive GRE exam ,travel to the US and get in Stanford out of a
Billion Indians.
I never cease to admire the Indians.

_Aslam_ {aslam_sheikh1975[at]hotmail[dot]com}

Wow , I never imagined such a compliment from a Pakistani !! Well we
don't have a good image of pakistan & pakistanis here in India. It was
heartening to see such views from u Aslam. Thanks for the compliment
once again. Maybe we (Indian & Pakis ) should talk more than we do (
unless our respective govt. allows us to do so ) :-(

Well after the recent Cricket series we had, I was forced to change my
perception of u people...the kind of hospitality our team ( and also
our people who went there to see matches) got, it was overwhelming &
surprising.

Now I think that we are actually the same people - with common culture
& history - its just that our governments do not want us to be
friends....this must change..since we are now liked to the same
fraternity ( Computer Sc. )

Bye
Nitin Bhardwaj

 

[Emmanuel Delahaye]

Wow , I never imagined such a compliment from a Pakistani !! Well we
don't have a good image of pakistan & pakistanis here in India. It was
heartening to see such views from u Aslam. Thanks for the compliment
once again. Maybe we (Indian & Pakis ) should talk more than we do (
unless our respective govt. allows us to do so ) :-(

Well after the recent Cricket series we had, I was forced to change my
perception of u people...the kind of hospitality our team ( and also
our people who went there to see matches) got, it was overwhelming &
surprising.

Now I think that we are actually the same people - with common culture
& history - its just that our governments do not want us to be
friends....this must change..since we are now liked to the same
fraternity ( Computer Sc. )

Some light in this age of darkeness ! Keep going friends. We all belong to
Humanity and our Land is Planet Earth.

 

[Dan Pop]

Well I had observed in c.l.c that most people augment their arguments
by citing the sectiion number & paragraphs from either the C89 or
C99..so I thought maybe I was missing this document terribly.

Many people are quoting from the drafts: C89/C90 has never been available
in a usable electonic format (the PDF sold at some point by ISO or ANSI
was made out of scans of the printed version) and the final C99 standard
is available only in PDF format (unlike N869, which is also available in
a nicely formatted plain text version).

With rare exceptions, the drafts are good enough for supporting one's
position in a debate.

Dan

 

[Dan Pop]

Some light in this age of darkeness ! Keep going friends. We all belong to
Humanity and our Land is Planet Earth. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

^^^^^^^^

Which basically means that Planet Earth is doomed :-(

Dan

 

[Emmanuel Delahaye]

^^^^^^^^
Which basically means that Planet Earth is doomed :-(

Come on, hope is life.

 

[Alan Balmer]

Except that the OP was not a programmer but a student.

Making it even more unlikely that the acquisition of the final
standard is actually essential.

How many CS students in the US have their own copy of the standard?
How many working programmers have one?

 

[Alan Balmer]

You just got through saying that they should "find a job in which the
requisite information reflects a smaller percentage of their take home
pay".

No, I didn't. You've screwed up the attributions.

Well, how is somebody going to do a job without the requisite
information? You have to have the later before you can do the former.
IOW, you're putting the cart before the horse! Obviously, you would rather
not have this competition, but what are you going to do about it? Make
more specious arguments? The bottom line is 740 USD is a lot less than
+60000 USD.

I don't know of any programmers who make +60,000 USD per month, unless
you think Bill Gates is still a programmer.

 

[Alan Balmer]

In the Netherlands, public libraries do not cater for technical literature.
Especially when it is expensive (as the C standard from ISO is). When they
did, they had to increase the subscription price to the library, so all users
would suffer.

Interesting. Our public libraries are biased toward acquisitions which
will be used by the most people, so you are much more likely to find
entry-level texts and books about Excel and Powerpoint, but they
certainly do keep technical books, and many subscribe to technical
journals. When local libraries don't have an item, they can often
obtain it from another library. Some public library systems have
lending relationships with University and industrial libraries.

In the particular case of the standard, I'm confident that I could
persuade the local public library to acquire a copy of the PDF and
make it available on one computer at a time, or perhaps even buy a
copy for each of their computers. Nearly all public libraries now have
computers and Internet connections available to users.

I didn't know that your library access is by subscription. In the US,
public libraries are government funded, from tax money.

But I do not think there is a single university library that
has the C standard. The library of my institute (and we are a research
institute for mathematics and computer science), does not have the standard.
By special request we have the 1989 standard (and it is sitting in my room).

I find it very odd that a research institute for mathematics and
computer science would not have copies of nearly every standard in the
field.

 

[pete]

Dan Pop wrote:

With rare exceptions, the drafts are good enough for supporting one's
position in a debate.

I use a two out of three rule.
Anything that is found in two out of the following three:
1 K&R2
2 C89 last public draft
3 N869
.... I consider to be valid C89.

 

[Joe Wright]

Dan Pop wrote:




I use a two out of three rule.
Anything that is found in two out of the following three:
1 K&R2
2 C89 last public draft
3 N869
... I consider to be valid C89.

Surely N869 is the C99 draft.

 

[Keith Thompson]

Surely N869 is the C99 draft.

Yes. Using the two out of three rule, anything found in N869 but not
in either of K&R2 or the C89 last public draft would not be considered
valid C89. I'm not sure how much sense the rule makes, but it's not
obviously absurd.

 

[Joe Wright]

Yes. Using the two out of three rule, anything found in N869 but not
in either of K&R2 or the C89 last public draft would not be considered
valid C89. I'm not sure how much sense the rule makes, but it's not
obviously absurd.

I missed the point. Sorry.

 

[Dan Pop]

I use a two out of three rule.
Anything that is found in two out of the following three:
1 K&R2
2 C89 last public draft
3 N869
... I consider to be valid C89.

Unfortunately, K&R2 was based on the same C89 draft. When the final
standard was released, the authors tried to update their text, to reflect
the final standard, but they still overlooked a few things. So, according
to your rule, in a printf format, %x expects an int argument.

Fortunately, such instances are few and far between.

Dan

 

[Dan Pop]

Come on, hope is life.

It's perfectly possible to die while still hoping ;-)

Dan

 

[Rufus V. Smith]

I couldn't disagree more. I see almost no reason why a university student
has to have one. The odds are that ZERO of their professors even have a
copy of it, or be expecting a student to have read it.

Frankly, I'd rather write code that was compatible with the compiler I'm
using,
standards-compliant or not.

Rufus

 

[Eric Sosman]

[...]
Frankly, I'd rather write code that was compatible with the compiler I'm
using,
standards-compliant or not.

"You are young. Life has been kind to you.
You ... will ... learn ..."
-- Benjamin Barker