Preface
The computing world has undergone a revolution since the publication of The C Programming Language in 1978. Big computers are much bigger, and personal computers have capabilities that rival the mainframes of a decade ago. During this time, C has changed too, although only modestly, and it has spread far beyond its origins as the language of the UNIX operating system.
The growing popularity of C, the changes in the language over the years, and the creation of compilers by groups not involved in its design, combined to demonstrate a need for a more precise and more contemporary definition of the language than the First edition of this book provided. In 1983, the American National Standards Institute [ANSI] established a committee whose goal was to produce "an unambiguous and machine-independent definition of the language C," while still retaining its spirit. The result is the ANSI standard for C.
The standard formalizes constructions that were hinted at but not described in the first edition, particularly structure assignment and enumerations. It provides a new form of function declaration that permits cross-checking of defini-tion with use. It specifies a standard library, with an extensive set of functions for performing input and output, memory management, string manipulation, and similar tasks. It makes precise the behavior of features that were not spelled out in the original definition, and at the same time states explicitly which aspects of the language remain machine-dependent.
This second edition of The C Programming Language describes C as defined by the ANSI standard. Although we have noted the places where the language has evolved, we have chosen to write exclusively in the new form. For the most part, this makes no significant difference; the most visible change is the new form of function declaration and definition. Modern compilers already support most features of the standard.
We have tried to retain the brevity of the first edition. C is not a big language, and it is not well served by a big book. We have improved the exposition of critical features, such as pointers, that are central to C programming. We have refined the original examples, and have added new examples in several chapters. For instance, the treatment of complicated declarations is augmented by programs that convert declarations into words and vice versa. As before, all examples have been tested directly from the text, which is in machine-readable form.
Appendix A, the reference manual, is not the standard, but our attempt to convey the essentials of the standard in a smaller space. It is meant for easy comprehension by programmers, but not as a definition for compiler writersÑ that role properly belongs to the standard itself. Appendix B is a summary of the facilities of the standard library. It too is meant for reference by programmers, not implementers. Appendix C is a concise summary of the changes from the original version.
As we said in the preface to the first edition, C "wears well as one's experience with it grows." With a decade more experience, we still feel that way. We hope that this book will help you to learn C and to use it well.Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis M. RitchiePreface to the First Edition
C is a general-purpose programming language which features economy of expression, modern control flow and data structures, and a rich set of operators. C is not a "very high level" language, nor a "big" one, and is not specialized to any particular area of application. But its absence of restrictions and its generality make it more convenient and effective for many tasks than
supposedly more powerful languages.
C was originally designed for and implemented on the UNIX operating sys-tem on the DEC PDP-1 1, by Dennis Ritchie. The operating system, the C compiler, and essentially all UNIX applications programs [including all of the software used to prepare this book] are written in C. Production compilers also exist for several other machines, including the IBM System/370, the Honeywell 6000, and the Interdata 8/32. C is not tied to any particular hardware or system, however, and it is easy to write programs that will run without change on any machine that supports C.
This book is meant to help the reader learn how to program in C. It contains a tutorial introduction to get new users started as soon as possible, separate chapters on each major feature, and a reference manual. Most of the treatment is based on reading, writing and revising examples, rather than on mere statements of rules. For the most part, the examples are complete, real programs, rather than isolated fragments. All examples have been tested directly from the text, which is in machine-readable form. Besides showing how to make
effective use of the language, we have also tried where possible to illustrate useful
algorithms and principles of good style and sound design.
The book is not an introductory programming manual; it assumes some familiarity with basic programming concepts like variables, assignment statements, loops, and functions. Nonetheless, a novice programmer should be able to read along and pick up the language, although access to a more knowledgeable colleague will help.
In our experience, C has proven to be a pleasant, expressive, and versatile language for a wide variety of programs. It is easy to learn, and it wears well as one's experience with it grows. We hope that this book will help you to use it well.Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis M. Ritchie
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Edward C. Johnson III, a publicity-shy Bostonian who transformed a small company created to manage the department-store wealth of his Mayflower-pedigreed ancestors into one of the world’s biggest investment companies and the nation’s largest administrator of workplace retirement plans, died on Wednesday at his home in Wellington, Fla. He was 91. The death was announced on LinkedIn by his daughter Abigail, the current chief executive of the firm, Fidelity Investments. Mr. Johnson, widely known as Ned, led FMR, Fidelity’s parent company, and drove it to prominence in the 1960s with heavily promoted, aggressively managed “go-go’’ stock funds. In 1974, the company helped popularize the fledgling money-market business by allowing customers to write checks against its money fund. “They were the unquestioned industry leader,” John C. Bogle, founder of the archrival Vanguard Group, which favored a more conservative market approach, less reliant on star portfolio managers, and eventually overtook Fidelity in assets under management, said several years ago in an interview for this obituary. [Mr. Bogle died in 2019.] Mr. Johnson’s exceptionally long tenure — he joined the family firm as a junior stock analyst in 1957 and presided over Fidelity into the 2010s, when he was in his 80s — coincided with a huge expansion of industry products as well as assets, and he eagerly embraced technological advances to provide services that later became commonplace. He first offered retail customers the ability to conduct transactions by toll-free telephone; he pioneered walk-in investor centers; and he revived, and then popularized, funds focused on specific industry sectors, like health care. At his death, Fidelity had more than 500 mutual funds and $11.8 trillion under administration. The company, about half owned by the Johnson family and half by its other employees, had revenue of $24 billion and operating income of $8.1 billion. “He was a true visionary,” said John M. Boyd, a financial services executive and a former Fidelity employee. Mr. Johnson in his dining room at the Fidelity offices in Boston in 1994. Credit...John Bohn/The Boston Globe Besides its huge stable of mutual funds — which included the Magellan Fund, managed by Mr. Johnson before Peter Lynch piloted it to superstardom — Fidelity’s businesses came to include a huge division administering 401[k] plans and maintaining other records for companies. It also provided discount and institutional securities brokerage; was active in real estate; and owned a group of weekly community newspapers and even a limousine and bus service, which was said to have been created when Mr. Johnson was once unable to hail a taxi. The Johnson family, which has Boston roots dating to 1635 and made its initial fortune with the C.F. Hovey & Company department store, has long been one of New England’s leading philanthropists, often anonymously, particularly in the visual arts. Mr. Johnson’s personal art collection is valued in the scores of millions. Edward Crosby Johnson III was born on June 29, 1930, in Boston, and grew up in Milton, a suburb. His mother, Elsie, was a homemaker. Ned was an indifferent student, but after attending various private schools — he once informed a teacher who had corrected his spelling that he would always have an aide to do proofreading — he managed to enter Harvard at 20. He graduated in 1954. After graduation and a stint with the U.S. Army in Germany, Mr. Johnson took a low-level job at State Street Bank before joining the small mutual fund in which his father, Edward II, had invested. He took control of it in 1946. Mr. Johnson quickly showed promise as a stock analyst and portfolio manager under the tutelage of Gerald Tsai Jr., a celebrated gunslinger of a portfolio manager. As the story goes, Mr. Tsai was told by Mr. Johnson’s father one Saturday in 1964 that Mr. Tsai would take over the company, but the senior Mr. Johnson had a change of heart over the weekend and decided that his son should run Fidelity instead. Mr. Tsai wound up selling his stake in Fidelity and moved to New York, where he created the Manhattan Fund and became a billionaire corporate financier. He died in 2008. For decades, Fidelity was the subject of intense speculation about whom Mr. Johnson would designate as his successor. After holding various senior positions at the company and becoming for a time its largest shareholder, his daughter Abigail was named chief executive in 2014. At his death, Mr. Johnson’s title was chairman emeritus. Last year, Forbes magazine ranked Abigail Johnson and her father as the 27th and 60th richest people in the world, with assets totaling $36.7 billion. His only son, Edward IV, is president of Pembroke, a real estate firm affiliated with Fidelity, and his other daughter, Elizabeth, is not involved in the family business. In addition to his children, Mr. Johnson is survived by his wife, Elizabeth [Hodges] Johnson, whom he married in 1960, and seven grandchildren. In 2007, in a rare interview, Mr. Johnson ruminated to Institutional Investor magazine about managing private companies. He declared that while outsiders may be given important roles, family members need to be prominent to provide stability “and an ongoing philosophy or culture of doing things a certain way.” A major element of Mr. Johnson’s managerial style was his adoption of kaizen, a Japanese strategy involving constant incremental improvement that he learned about from a book he had found in the gift shop of a Tokyo hotel. He hired the author to lecture Fidelity executives, made a video about kaizen for new employees and wrote the foreword to another kaizen book, which included Fidelity as a case study. Observers have often suggested that Mr. Johnson’s devotion to kaizen might explain the frequent personnel shifts at Fidelity, including Mr. Johnson’s removal of his daughter Abigail as head of the mutual fund division, which was suffering from mediocre performance, in 2005. A chronic experimenter, Mr. Johnson fomented intense competition among fund managers and other staff, sometimes giving two employees the same assignment to see which would produce the better solution. He fiercely defended the independence and privacy afforded by Fidelity’s family ownership, and he fought efforts by the Securities and Exchange Commission to require the separation of fund governance from that of management-company sponsors. Mr. Johnson in 2008. He fiercely defended the independence and privacy afforded by Fidelity’s family ownership.Credit...REUTERS/Brian Snyder He said he was proud of his dual role as an owner of the management company and chairman of the funds’ board of trustees, insisting that shareholders’ best protection is not “laws or a chairman’s so-called independence” but the “moral fiber” of the leadership. Mr. Johnson also unsuccessfully opposed an S.E.C. initiative to force fund companies to disclose how they vote portfolio shares. Considering his means, Mr. Johnson’s lifestyle was modest. His three-story brick townhouse in the Beacon Hill neighborhood cost $117,500 in 1970 [the equivalent of about $850,000 today] but boasts a garden, shared with neighbors and that, according to Boston magazine, was once the site of grand literary salons frequented by such luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Dickens and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. A frugal, tough negotiator, and obsessive about detail, Mr. Johnson never built an impressive headquarters. He was content to run his far-flung empire from an unadorned nine-story structure marked “Fidelity Building’’ by small bronze plaques. Although Fidelity was often criticized for lacking transparency and accountability to outsiders, which some say hurt its competitiveness as it saw its share of the fund market shrink in recent years, Mr. Johnson was adamant about maintaining the company’s freedom of action and privacy. “Ned Johnson is an old-style proper Boston Yankee who thinks you’re boasting and acting unseemly if you get your name in the paper,” said the financial journalist Joe Nocera, who writes regularly for The Times’s DealBook newsletter. “When his advisers once told him that Fidelity would have to talk to the press, his response was ‘Fine, as long as it’s not me.’” He did, however, partly lift the veil of reticence and mystique when, to commemorate the company’s 50th anniversary in 1996, he ordered the staff to produce a history that inevitably became the story of the Johnson family. The limited-edition two-volume work was titled “There Will Be Dancing,” a reference to the instruction Mr. Johnson’s father gave for planning his retirement party. In an interview a decade earlier, an intrepid reporter asked Mr. Johnson when Fidelity might offer its stock to the public. His terse reply: “When I’m dead and buried.” Alex Traub contributed reporting.