Portable C

This text is addressed to MS-DOS C programmers looking to move computer programs onto UNIX, OS/2 or Macintosh environments, UNIX C programmers looking to expand the range of their programs to the PC market, programmers who want to deepen their understanding of the C language and C programmers who have to port other people's code to their own machines. This book, based on a course developed by the authors for AT&T Bell Laboratories, demonstrates the techniques required to construct C programs that will work in many different hardware and software environments. Using portable C, the code will have a wider market and a longer lifetime. This volume offers examples of non-portable code and how-to-fix-it suggestions; a set of rules to help create portable programs; and the C-World, a model of the execution of programs that does not depend on the features of any specific machine. The book also presents a style of writing C programs that is intended to help the programmer take advantage of the strengths of ANSI C while it remains compatible with pre-ANSI compilers. There are also tips to help the programmer modify existing code to port to new environments.