What is “C”? Where is C defined? Unfortunately, several places.
The oldest “official” source is The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie. There are:
Next there are a bunch of standards referred to by year number: C89, C99, C11. The best source for these seems to be this site.
Since C seems to emphasize backwards compatibility, you can read them in order. This might make sense, because the older versions are much shorter.
“There’s a new ISO C standard, published in 2011 (after this answer was posted). ANSI, as usual, has adopted the ISO C11 standard as an ANSI standard. For historical reasons, the phrase “ANSI C” commonly (but incorrectly) refers to the language defined by the ANSI C89 / ISO C90 standard. Since C standards are now published by ISO first, and since there have been three ISO C standards, with varying levels of adoption, it’s best to refer to the year the standard was published (ISO C90, ISO C99, ISO C11) to avoid any confusion.” http://stackoverflow.com/a/1608350/229792
I wrote this because I felt like it. This post is my own, and not associated with my employer.
Jim. Public speaking. Friends. Vidrio.