Prentice Hall's most important C programming title in years. A companion volume to Kernighan & Ritchie's C PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE. A collection of reusable functions (code for building data structures, code for performing math functions and scientific calculations, etc.) which will save C programmers time and money especially when working on large programming projects. The C Library is part of the ANSI (American National Standard Institute) for the C Language. This new book contains the complete code for the library. It covers elements of the library with which even the most experienced C programmers are not familiar such as internationalization (the ability to write programs that can adapt to different cultural locales, for example, using the C library, programmers can write software that manipulates large character sets such as Kanji). Structured like the Standard C Library, it contains 15 headers declaring or defining all of the names in the library. A separate chapter covers each header, including excerpts from relevant portions of the C Standard showing all codes needed to implement each portion of the library and explaining why it is necessary. The book teaches readers the concepts and design issues associated with library building. Using this book, programemrs will be less likely to re-code something that already exists in a given program. Plauger is one of the world's leading experts on C and the C Library.

This book shows you how to use all the library functions mandated by the ANSI and ISO Standards for the programming language C. I have chosen to focus on the library exclusively, since many other books describe the language proper. The book also shows you how to implement the library. I present about 9,000 lines of tested, working code. I believe that seeing a realistic implementation of the Standard С library can help you better understand how to use it. As much as possible, the code for the library is written in Standard C. The primary design goal is to make the code as readable and as exemplary as possible. A secondary goal is to make the code highly portable across diverse computer architectures. Still another goal is to present code that makes sensible tradeoffs between accuracy, performance, and size. Teaching you how to write С is not a goal of this book. I assume you know enough about С to read straightforward code. Where the code presented is not so straightforward, I explain the trickery involved. The Standard С library is fairly ambitious. It provides considerable power in many different environments. It promises well-defined name spaces for both user and implementor. It imposes fairly strict requirements on the robustness and precision of its mathematical functions. And it pioneers in supporting code that adapts to varied cultures, including those with very large character sets. To benefit from these ambitions, a user should be aware of numerous subtleties. To satisfy these ambitions, an implementor must provide for them. These subtleties are not always addressed in the С Standard proper. It is not the primary purpose of a standard to educate implementors. Nor are many of these subtleties well explained in the Rationale that accompanies the ANSI С Standard. A Rationale must serve several masters, only one of whom is the inquisitive implementor. The pioneering features I mentioned above are not found in traditional implementations of C. An implementation can now support multiple locales. Each locale captures numerous conventions peculiar to a country, language, or profession. А С program can alter and query locales to adapt dynamically to a broad range of cultures. An implementation can also now support very large character sets, such as the Kanji characters used in Japan.