How one can include his/her own programming functions to standard C (ANSI C) library? And any one who is learning or working on C language able to use those functions anywhere anytime, no need of development in general.
Example : someone developed function named "FunFun()" and assume it does fantastic work for most programmers. so how anyone can access this "FunFun" function without developing and just including standard library?
The sane way to approach it would be to develop a 3rd party library and make it available over the internet through open source, Github etc.
The GNU C dialect is one such example, which is a collection of non-standard compiler extensions used by the GCC compiler. One could join the GCC open source group and try to get the new function added there. It would still not be standard library C, but the GCC extensions are often an inspiration to the C standard and several of them (designated initializers, flexible array members, anonymous struct/union etc) have been adopted into the language itself with the C99 and C11 standards. One of the purposes for GNU C is actually to serve as an experimental playground where new languages features can be tried out live.
If you truly wish to add a new function to the actual C standard library, you would have to join the ISO working group and convince them that the function should be added to the language. Or alternatively find a member of the committee and convince them to speak in favour of the new function.
All this of course assuming you are a C programming veteran, or otherwise nobody will likely take you seriously.
Your question can't be answered because it's based on several wrong assumptions.
Things like stdlib.h are not libraries. They are header files intended to be included in your program. Including means the contents are literally pasted into your program at the point of inclusion before the actual compilation happens. They are typically used for declaring functions, types, global variables etc a library provides. The actual library is then linked against after compilation.
There's no such thing as the C library as well as there's no such thing as the C compiler. c is a language that is specified in an open standard (if you're interested, here's the last draft of the latest standard version C11). There are many actual implementations and a complete implementation consists of at least a compiler and a standard library. You can of course implement your own standard library. It's a lot of work to have it really conform to the standard (you would have to implement printf() and scanf() correctly, for example). With your own standard library, you can also include your own extensions, but this would only mean people using your standard library (instead of e.g. glibc on a GNU system) could directly use them.
For having a function available on any implementation of C, it would be necessary to have the C Standard specify it. You won't get a new function in the standard without some very good reasoning.
So if you want to make your own function available to others, do what everyone does and just implement it in your own library. Users can download it, include its headers and link against it.
Related
This question is about the same subject as strdup or _strdup? but it is not the same. That question asks how to work around MS's renamings, this question asks why they did it in the first place.
For some reason Microsoft has deprecated a whole slew of POSIX C functions and replaced them with _-prefixed variants. One example among many is isatty:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/c-runtime-library/reference/posix-isatty
This POSIX function is deprecated. Use the ISO C++ conformant _isatty instead.
What exactly is ISO C++ conformant about _isatty? It appears to me that the MSDN help is totally wrong.
The other questions answer explained how to deal with this problem. You add the _CRT_NONSTDC_NO_DEPRECATE define. Fine. But I want to know what Microsoft's thinking is. What was their point in renaming and deprecating functions? Was it just to make C programmers lives even harder?
The fact that _isatty() is ISO C++ conformant makes sense if you think of it like a language-lawyer.
Under ISO C++, the compiler is only supposed to provide the functions in the standard (at least for the standard headers) -- they're not allowed to freely add extra functions, because it could conflict with functions declared in the code being compiled. Since isatty() is not listed in the standard, providing an isatty() function in a standard header would not be ISO C++ compliant.
However, the standard does allow the compiler to provide any function it wants as long as the function starts with a single underscore. So -- language lawyer time -- _isatty() is compliant with ISO C++.
I believe that's the logic that leads to the error message being phrased the way it is.
(Now, in this specific case, isatty() was provided in io.h, which is not actually a C++ standard header, so technically Microsoft could provide it and still claim to be standards-conformant. But, they had other non-compliant functions like strcmpi() in string.h, which is a standard header. So, for consistency, they deprecated all of the POSIX functions the same way and they all report the same error message.)
Names starting with an underscore, like _isatty are reserved for the implementation. They do not have a meaning defined by ISO C++, nor by ISO C, and you can't use them for your own purposes. So Microsoft is entirely right in using this prefix, and POSIX is actually wrong.
C++ has namespaces, so a hypthetical "Posix C++" could define namespace posix, but POSIX has essentially become fossilized - no new innovation in that area.
isatty & co., although POSIX, are not standard C, and are provided as "extensions" by the VC++ runtime1.
As such, they are prefixed with an underscore supposedly to avoid name clashes - as names starting with an underscore followed by a lowercase letter are reserved for implementation-defined stuff at global scope. So if, for example, you wanted to use an actual POSIX compatibility layer providing its own versions of these functions, they wouldn't have to fight with the VC++-provided "fake" ones for the non-underscored names.
Extensions which have no presumption to be actually POSIX-compliant, by the way.
I'm studying C language nowadays. In this book, it is said that the "compiler provides these library functions: 'printf','scanf'…".
I can't understand. Those functions are defined in the header file <stdio.h> aren't they?
Why does this book explain those functions are provided by the compiler?
printf, scanf, and the other standard library functions are provided as part of the implementation.
A C implementation is made up of several components. The compiler is just one of them. The library is another; it consists of headers (commonly provided as source files like stdio.h) and some form of object code files containing the code that actually implements the library functions.
The header stdio.h only declares these functions; it doesn't define them. The declaration of printf is something like:
int printf(const char *format, ...);
The definition of printf is the code that actually does the job of parsing the format string, accessing the arguments, and sending the formatted output to stdout. That's typically (but not necessarily) written in C and provided as some kind of linkable object code.
For some C implementations, the compiler and the library are provided by the same organization. For others, they might be provided separately (for example MinGW combines the gcc compiler with Microsoft's library).
The functions are provided by the standard library, which is a collection of precompiled code that is typically written by the compiler authors (but it is indeed not a part of the compiler itself).
Note, though, that the functions are only declared in the header files. The definition resides in source files that have already been compiled.
By saying, "Compiler provides these library functions , 'printf','scanf'..", the author of the book is being sloppy.
A standard conforming C implementation provides declarations of those functions in header files and implementations of those functions in some short of library. A compiler is just one aspect of a C programming environment.
The compiler does not provide those functions. The goal of the compiler is to translate your high-level language code into another form, in particular an executable binary.
The standard C library contains the functions in stdio.h and stdlib.h.
The compiler links the standard library with your code so that your code can call those functions.
For almost all libraries, you have to tell the compiler what libraries you want to link. It so happens that for some compilers, the library (libc) for stdio.h and stlib.h is automatically linked without you needing to specify them.
Those functions provided by standard library and GCC includes built-in versions of many of the functions in the standard C library.
https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Other-Builtins.html
I'm learning C for 2 months. I experimented with different IDEs and my experiments resulted in confusion. Because for e.g. in NETBEANS I can use abs function without stdlib.h library, but when I tried to do the same thing in Visual Studio 2012 it gave a an error. Or a very odd thing in NETBEANS I can use functions from math.h library without declaring the library. Why is this happening? Can someone help? NETBEANS USES cygwin compilers.
In C you don't need to include the headers in order to use the functions. Older compilers don't always warn about that though. Also, different compilers might provide those functions in different ways; on some, they're not functions but macros. With macros, you need to include the headers.
It's good practice to always include the headers that provide the functions you need, so that you get the function prototypes. That's the only way the compiler can check for errors (correct types of passed function arguments, for example.) If you call a function for which you have no prototype, you get an implicit declaration of that function. That means the compiler just takes a guess and hopes you're using the function correctly, but has no way to check. That's why this won't work with macros, since a macro can't have a function declaration (implicit or not.)
The reason Visual Studio gives an error is because it's a C++ compiler, not a C compiler. C++ is a bit different from C. One of the differences is that C++ does not allow implicit function declarations. If you don't declare the functions you use (by including their header file in this case), then that's considered an error. C++ is mostly compatible with C, but that happens to be one of the few differences.
Btw, they're not libraries. They're header files. There's a difference. You have several standard headers you can include, but you only have one library; the C library. On most systems, you also have a math library, which only contains math functions. The point though is that several header files can be (and usually are) part of the same library.
my experience with C has been the same. different compilers has different libraries and sometimes they don't stick to the standards.
some compiler vendors try to lock you in (XXXXX$XXX) :)
I have heard that in Windows, parameters are passed a single parameter, and then the program splits it into arguments, either in its runtime libraries, or sometimes, in the actual code.
I've heard that most C/C++ compilers do it in runtime libararies (for example, TCC - Tiny C Compiler, which I downloaded)
Are there any C compilers I can download, that don't? Any links to them?
And in such a compiler, would argsv[0] have the whole string?
Added
It's based on what this person (jdedb) said in Super User question Can't pipe or redirect Cygwin grep output, after seeming to suggest that I ask on Stack Overflow.
"It's up to the called program to split the command tail into words, if it wants to operate in Unix (and C language) fashion. (The runtime support libraries of most C and C++ language implementations for Win32 do this splitting behind the scenes."
He said it's the compilers.. But according to Necrolis, it's not the compiler.
(added- Necrolis commented correcting my misreading, compiler!=runtime library)
If you are on Windows, just use GetCommandLine. This is how most CRT wrappers get the command line to split to start with.
As for your actual question, it's not the compiler, but the CRT startup wrapper that they use. If you implement mainCRTstartup, and override the entrypoint with it, you can do whatever you want. A good example of how it works can be seen here.
That "parameter splitting" is the way mandated by the C99 Standard (PDF file) in 5.1.2.2.1.
If an implementation (compiler + library + options) recognizes but does not separate the program name from the other parameters (and parameters from each other) it is not conforming.
Of course, if you use a free-standing implementation none of this applies.
Does C (or any other low-level language, for that matter) even have source, or is the compiler the part that "does all the work", including parsing? If so, couldn't different compilers have different C dialects? Where does the stdlib factor into this? I would really like to know how this works.
The C language is not a piece of software but a defined standard, so one wouldn't say that it's open-source, but rather that it's an open standard.
There are a gazillion different compilers for C however, and many of those are indeed open-source. The most notable example is GCC's C compiler, which is all under the GNU General Public License (GPL), an open-source license.
There are more options. Watcom is open-source, for instance. There is no shortage of open-source C compilers, but without a doubt the most widespread one, at least in the non-Windows world, is GCC.
For Windows, your best bet is probably Watcom or GCC by using Cygwin or MinGW.
C is a standard which specifies how C compilers should generate programs.
C itself doesn't have any source code, just like a musical note doesn't have any plastic.
Some C compilers, such as GCC, are open source.
C is just a language, and a standardised one at that, too. It pretty much is the compiler that "does all the work". Different compilers did have different dialects; before the the C99 ANSI standard, you had things like Borland C and other competing compilers, that implemented the C language in their own fantastic ways.
stdlib is just an agreed-upon collection of standard libraries that are required to be present in any ANSI C implementation.
To add on to the other great answers:
Regarding different dialects -- there are some additional features added to C that are compiler specific. You can provide the command line flag -std=... to gcc to specify the C standard that you want to use, each has slight variations/additions to syntax, the most common is probably c99.
Each compiler tends to implement a few different extras, for example, typeof() is not in the C standard and so compilers do not have to implement this but nevertheless it is useful and most compilers provide it. Here is a list of gcc C extensions
The stdlib is a set of functions specified in the C standard. Much like compilers, stdlib can have different implementations. The GNU implementation is open source, as is gcc, but there are other compilers and could be other implementations of stdlib that are closed source.
The Compiler would determine all the mappings from C to Assembly etc... but as far as someone owning it.....noone really owns C however the ANSI/ISO determines the standards
GCC's C compiler is written in C. So we know there are at least one C compiler written in C.
GNU's stdlib (glibc) is also written in C (stdio.h, stdlib.h). But it also has some parts written in assembly language.
A really good question. There is a way to define a language standard (not the implementation!) in a form of a "source code", in a strict and unambigous language. Unfortunately, all of the old languages, including C, are poorly defined. But it is still possible to translate that definitions into a source code form.
Another approach is to define a language via its operational semantics, often in a form of a simple (and unefficient) reference implementation.
Helgi Hrafn Gunnarsson has written the main answer but I thought it would be worth noting that you can effectively end up with dialects too.
The compilers should do the same thing with regards to whichever standard they support (which these days should be pretty much all the same version) but there are grey areas. The way in which the compilers work for 'undefined' functionality for example. If the C specification says that the behaviour is undefined for a specific case then the compiler can do pretty much what it wants.
There are also examples of functions added to the libraries (and new libraries added) by the compiler makers to support specific platform traits, create a competitive advantage or simply to make life easier. The cynical might suggest that some of these are added to help lock people into a specific compiler too.
I would say that C as a language is not open source.
As pointed out by many, you can download GNU licensed compilers and libraries for free, but if you wanted to write your own C compiler, you would need to follow the ISO C standards, and ISO charge hard cash for the specification of the C language, which at the time of posting this is $178.
So really the answer depends on what elements you are interested in being free and open source.
I'm not sure what your definitions of "open source" are.
For the standardization process, it is possible for anyone to participate, but if you want to be able to vote then you will need to pay to join your national body (for instance, ANSI for the USA, BSI for the UK, AFNOR for France etc.). As a rule most standards body memberships are paid by corporations. That said, the process is fairly open. You can access discussion papers on the standards web site.
The standards themselves are not free either. The ISO pdf store currently sells the C standard for 198 swiss francs. Draft copies of the standard can be found easily for free.
There are plenty of open source implementations of both compilers and libraries.