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Recent Changes To C (1978)

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27 views1 page

Recent Changes To C (1978)

Uploaded by

lcdbateria
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Recent Changes to C

November 15, 1978

A few extensions have been made to the C language beyond what is described in the reference docu-
ment (‘‘The C Programming Language,’’ Prentice-Hall, 1978).

1. Structure assignment
Structures may be assigned, passed as arguments to functions, and returned by functions. The types
of the operands taking part must be the same. Other plausible operators, such as equality comparison, have
not been implemented.
There is a defect in the PDP-11 implementation of functions that return structures: if an interrupt
occurs during the return sequence, and the same function is called reentrantly during the interrupt, the value
returned from the first call may be corrupted. The problem can occur only in the presence of true interrupts,
as in an operating system or a user program that makes significant use of signals; ordinary recursive calls
are quite safe.

2. Enumeration type
There is a new data type analogous to the scalar types of Pascal. To the type-specifiers in the syntax
on p. 193 of the C book add
enum-specifier

with syntax
enum-specifier:
enum { enum-list }
enum identifier W { enum-list W}
enum identifier

enum-list:
enumerator
enum-list , enumerator

enumerator:
identifier
identifier = constant-expression

The role of the identifier in the enum-specifier is entirely analogous to that of the structure tag on a struct-
specifier; it names a particular enumeration. For example,
enum color { chartreuse, burgundy, claret, winedark };
. . .
enum color *cp, col;

makes color the enumeration-tag of a type describing various colors, and then declares cp as a pointer to
an object of that type, and col as an object of that type.
The identifiers in the enum-list are declared as constants, and may appear wherever constants are
required. If no enumerators with = appear, then the values of the constants begin at 0 and increase by 1 as
the declaration is read from left to right. An enumerator with = gives the associated identifier the value
indicated; subsequent identifiers continue the progression from the assigned value.
Enumeration tags and constants must all be distinct, and unlike structure tags and members, are
drawn from the same set as ordinary identifiers.
Objects of a given enumeration type are regarded as having a type distinct from objects of all other
types, and lint flags type mismatches. In the PDP-11 implementation all enumeration variables are treated
as if they were int.

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