Introduction
There is no doubt that the Standard Committee's decision to define a set of
library routines will prove to be a huge benefit to users of C. Previously there
were no standard, accepted, definitions of library routines to provide support
for the language. As a result, portability suffered seriously.
The library routines do not have to be present; they will only be present in a
hosted environment—typically the case for applications programmers. Writers of
embedded systems and the writers of the hosted environment libraries will not
have the libraries present. They are using ‘raw’ C, in a freestanding
environment, and this chapter will not be of much interest to them.
Headers and standard types
A number of types and macros are used widely by the library functions. Where necessary, they are defined in the appropriate #include file for that function. The header will also declare appropriate types and prototypes for the library functions. Some important points should be noted here:* All external identifiers and macro names declared in any of the library headers are reserved. They must not be used, or redefined, for any other purpose. In some cases they may be ‘magic’—their names may be known to the compiler and cause it to use special methods to implement them.
* All identifiers that begin with an underscore are reserved.
* Headers may be included in any order, and more than once, but must be included outside of any external declaration or definition and before any use of the functions or macros defined inside them.
* Giving a ‘bad value’ to a function—say a null pointer, or a value outside the range of values expected by the function—results in undefined behavior unless otherwise stated.
Character set and cultural dependencies
The Committee has introduced features that attempt to cater for
the use of C in environments which are not based on the
character set of US ASCII and where there are cultural
dependencies such as the use of comma or full stop to indicate
the decimal point. Facilities have been provided (see Section
9.4) for setting a program's idea of its locale, which is used
to control the behavior of the library functions.
Providing full support for different native languages and
customs is a difficult and poorly understood task; the
facilities provided by the C library are only a first step on
the road to a full solution.9.1.3. The <stddef.h> Header. There
are a small number of types and macros, found in <stddef.h>,
which are widely used in other headers. They are described in
the following paragraphs.
Subtracting one pointer from another gives a result whose type
differs between different implementations. To allow safe use of
the difference, the type is defined in <stddef.h> to be
ptrdiff_t. Similarly, you can use size_t to store the result of
sizeof.
For reasons which still escape us, there is an ‘implementation
defined null pointer constant’ defined in <stddef.h> called
NULL. Since the language explicitly defines the integer constant
0 to be the value which can be assigned to, and compared with, a
null pointer, this would seem to be unnecessary. However, it is
very common practice among experienced C programmers to write
this sort of thing:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stddef.h>
FILE *fp;
if((fp = fopen("somefile", "r")) != NULL){
/* and so on */
The <errno.h> Header
This header defines errno along with the macros EDOM and ERANGE, which expand to nonzero integral constant expressions; their form is additionally guaranteed to be acceptable to #if directives. The latter two are used by the mathematical functions to report which kind of errors they encountered and are more fully described later.errno is provided to tell you when library functions have detected an error. It is not necessarily, as it used to be, an external variable, but is now a modifiable lvalue that has type int. It is set to zero at program start-up, but from then on never reset unless explicitly assigned to; in particular, the library routines never reset it. If an error occurs in a library routine, errno is set to a particular value to indicate what went wrong, and the routine returns a value (often −1) to indicate that it failed. The usual use is like this: