kuro5hin: Are you Ready For C99?

“ANSI and the ISO ratified the newest draft of the C standard in
1999 and unleashed the biggest changes to the language to date. New
keywords, library functions, and macros are just the tip of the
iceberg when it comes to the new improved C. In fact, the language
is so different it is no longer compatible with C++. This article
attempts to give an overview of the major changes made to the C
language and also attempts to discover why no one yet seems to be
affected by the new standard….”

“The aforementioned features are rather impressive but one soon
realizes that this means that C is no longer a subset of C++. There
is a list of the major incompatibilities between the current ISO
standards for C and C++ on David Tribble’s webpage. At this point
it is still too early to see if either C or C++ will be harmed by
this development but it is clear that there will be some growing
pains once C99 adoption becomes widespread.”

“Bjarne Stroustrup mentioned in a recent interview with
LinuxWorld that he would have liked for both languages to be
compatible and would favor a technical committee whose express
purpose would be integrating both languages, but doubts the
possibility of this coming to pass. Stroustrup also contrasted how
C’s technical commitee decided to implement most of the added
functionality via changes to the actual C language against the C++
approach which was by adding additional libraries.”

Complete Story