> From: Lawrence Lile > OK, I keep hearing about ANSI C. Does anyone have a suggestion as to > how to find out what ANSI C is? Is the ANSI (American National > Standards Institute) definition of C useful in learning the stuff? > Or would this just be a waste of time? It is quite useful to learn about ANSI C.You can contact the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) at 11 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036 (212) 642-4948. The present ANSI C standard X3.159-1989 was created by the ANSI C Programming Language Committee X3J11 The international body ISO adopted the ANSI C standard in 1990 as ISO/IEC 9899:1990. ISO has created an international committee known as WG14 to further define and refine the language. (I am part of the Standards Council of Canada representation on this commitee) The ISO standard recognizes that embedded systems are non hosted environments. Quite a bit of work is currently being done by WG14 on embedded systems. In practical terms embedded systems need additional library support, formal understanding of multiple address spaces, additional data types, and additional data formats. Byte Craft's policy is to create compilers for 8 bit data processors that conform as closely as possible to the ISO / ANSI standards within the practical limitations of target processor. Internally we have been working on portability issues of transporting code from one embedded system platform to another. The last time I checked no embedded systems compiler for 8 bit data processors had ANSI C certification. In spite of advertisements to the contrary all commercial 8 bit compilers that I ran through the standard ANSI C recognized test suites produced literally hundreds of exceptions There are two books that are worth adding to your bookshelf ANSI and ISO Standard C Programmer's Reference P.J. Pauger and Jim Brodie, Microsoft Press ISBN 1-55615-359-7 This book has been published in a number of editions including at least one with a HTML version of the book on disk. This is a good reference book. The Annotated ANSI C Standard annotated by Herbert Schildt. Osborne/McGraw Hill ISBN 0-7-881952-0. This is a reprint of the ANSI X3.159-1989 document with annotations. It is now somewhat dated but has a full copy of the original document. Walter Banks http://www.bytecraft.com