In most of the 1990s I was involved in the ISO/IEC standards work on the C programming language. When I joined, the "C89" ANSI standard and "C90" ISO standards had already been published. I became part of the UK delegation to ISO/IEC/JTC1/SC22/WG14 (or just "WG14" for short) and was more than once the official UK representative at meetings, as opposed to just a UK person attending them.
In April 1994 P.J."Bill" Plauger, who also attended most of these meetings and who also edited the C Users Journal (renamed "C/C++ Users Journal" a few months later) put me in touch with his co-editor Marc Briand who, in turn, asked me to write one or more articles about some matters in the C Standard. I agreed.
Though I had plans for a whole series of articles,
only the first two got written:
"Understanding the Standard - what the words mean"
(published in the May 1995 issue)
about the terminology of the C Standard,
such as "diagnostic" and "unspecified", and
"Understanding the Standard - joining things together"
(published in the July 1995 issue)
about linkage.
I did have a subject for the third article - internationalization - but, for reasons I don't remember, the series ended with those two. A pity, because internationalization was a topic I had dealt with far more in my day job - having to deal with Japanese user interfaces - than most US and UK people would have done back then. And this was before the days of Unicode as a de facto standard. Maybe I'll write a retrospective one day (but don't hold your breath).
The copies of the articles on this site are taken directly from the sources I sent to Marc, though those were plain text. I've formatted them in what feels to me like the HTML equivalent to what I wrote rather than trying to rewrite or restyle them. Any errors in them were (I hope) there in the original text.
Given when they were written, they were based on C90 rather than the current C Standard or even C99 (which I was a major contributor to). So it's quite possible that some things have changed and statements I made in the articles are no longer applicable to today's C. While I'm happy to receive comments and error reports, please bear this in mind before telling me I've got something wrong.
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