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Posts Tagged ‘C99’

Was a C90, C99, or C11 compiler used?

January 2, 2018 2 comments

How can a program figure out whether it has been compiled with a C90, C99 or C11 compiler?

Support for the // style of commenting was added in C99.

Support for Unicode string literals (e.g., U"Hello World") was added in C11.

Putting these together we get the following:

#include <stdio.h>
 
#define M(U) sizeof(U"s"[0])
 
int main(void)
{
    switch(M("")*2 //**/ 2
                          )
       {
       case 1: printf("C90\n"); break;
       case 2: printf("C99\n"); break;
       case 8: printf("C11\n"); break;
       }
 
}
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A change of guard in the C standard’s world?

March 17, 2011 2 comments

I have just gotten back from the latest ISO C meeting (known as WG14 in the language standard’s world) which finished a whole day ahead of schedule; always a good sign that things are under control. Many of the 18 people present in London were also present when the group last met in London four years ago and if memory serves this same subset of people were also attending meetings 20 years ago when I traveled around the world as UK head of delegation (these days my enthusiasm to attend does not extend to leaving the country).

The current convenor, John Benito, is stepping down after 15 years and I suspect that many other active members will be stepping back from involvement once the current work on revising C99 is published as the new C Standard (hopefully early next year meaning it will probably be known as C12).

From the very beginning the active UK participants in WG14 have held one important point of view that has consistently been at odds with a view held by the majority of US participants; we in the UK have believed that it should be possible to deduce the requirements contained in the C Standard without reference to any deliberations of WG14, while many US participants have actively argued against what they see as over specification. I think one of the problems with trying to change US minds has been that the opinion leaders have been involved for so long and know the issues so well they cannot see how anybody could possible interpret wording in the standard in anything other than the ‘obvious’ way.

An example of the desire to not over specify is provided by a defect report I submitted 18 years ago, in particular question 19; what does:

#define f(a) a*g
#define g(a) f(a)
f(2)(9)

expand to? There are two possibilities and WG14 came to the conclusion that both were valid macro expansions, making the behavior unspecified. However, when it came to a vote the consensus came down on the side of saying nothing about this case in the normative body of the standard, the only visible evidence for this behavior being a bulleted item added to the annex containing the list of unspecified behaviors.

A new member of WG14 (he has only been involved for a few years) spotted this bulleted item that had no corresponding text in the main body of the standard, tracked down the defect report that generated it and submitted a new defect report asking for wording to be added. At the meeting today the straw poll of those present was in favor of adding an appropriate example to C12 {I will link to the appropriate paper once it appears on the public WG14 site}. A minor victory on the road to a full and complete specification.

It will be interesting to see what impact a standing down of the old guard, after the publication of C12, has C2X (the revision of C that is likely to be published around 10 years from now).

For those of you still scratching their head, the two possibilities are:

2*f(9)

or

2*9*g
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