ANSI C, ISO C, and Standard C are successive standards for the C programming language published by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22/WG 14 of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). Historically, the names referred specifically to the original and best-supported version of the standard. Software developers writing in C are encouraged to conform to the standards, as doing so helps portability between compilers.
C is a general-purpose computer programming language. It was created in the 1970s by Dennis Ritchie, and remains very widely used and influential. By design, C's features cleanly reflect the capabilities of the targeted CPUs. It has found lasting use in operating systems, device drivers, and protocol stacks, but its use in application software has been decreasing. C is commonly used on computer architectures that range from the largest supercomputers to the smallest microcontrollers and embedded systems.
Fortran is a general-purpose, compiled imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing.
In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic that represents subsets of real numbers using an integer with a fixed precision, called the significand, scaled by an integer exponent of a fixed base. Numbers of this form are called floating-point numbers. For example, 12.345 is a floating-point number in base ten with five digits of precision:
Lisp is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation. Originally specified in 1960, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language still in common use, after Fortran. Lisp has changed since its early days, and many dialects have existed over its history. Today, the best-known general-purpose Lisp dialects are Common Lisp, Scheme, Racket, and Clojure.
Pascal is an imperative and procedural programming language, designed by Niklaus Wirth as a small, efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring. It is named after French mathematician, philosopher and physicist Blaise Pascal.
Structured Query Language (SQL) is a domain-specific language used in programming and designed for managing data held in a relational database management system (RDBMS), or for stream processing in a relational data stream management system (RDSMS). It is particularly useful in handling structured data, i.e., data incorporating relations among entities and variables.
In computer programming, an arithmetic shift is a shift operator, sometimes termed a signed shift. The two basic types are the arithmetic left shift and the arithmetic right shift. For binary numbers it is a bitwise operation that shifts all of the bits of its operand; every bit in the operand is simply moved a given number of bit positions, and the vacant bit-positions are filled in. Instead of being filled with all 0s, as in logical shift, when shifting to the right, the leftmost bit is replicated to fill in all the vacant positions.
In computer science, an instruction set architecture (ISA), also called computer architecture, is an abstract model of a computer. A device that executes instructions described by that ISA, such as a central processing unit (CPU), is called an implementation.
C++ is a high-level, general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup. First released in 1985 as an extension of the C programming language, it has since expanded significantly over time; as of 1997 C++ has object-oriented, generic, and functional features, in addition to facilities for low-level memory manipulation. It is almost always implemented as a compiled language, and many vendors provide C++ compilers, including the Free Software Foundation, LLVM, Microsoft, Intel, Embarcadero, Oracle, and IBM.
The C standard library or libc is the standard library for the C programming language, as specified in the ISO C standard. Starting from the original ANSI C standard, it was developed at the same time as the C library POSIX specification, which is a superset of it. Since ANSI C was adopted by the International Organization for Standardization, the C standard library is also called the ISO C library.
The IEEE Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic is a technical standard for floating-point arithmetic established in 1985 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The standard addressed many problems found in the diverse floating-point implementations that made them difficult to use reliably and portably. Many hardware floating-point units use the IEEE 754 standard.
In computer science, a pointer is an object in many programming languages that stores a memory address. This can be that of another value located in computer memory, or in some cases, that of memory-mapped computer hardware. A pointer references a location in memory, and obtaining the value stored at that location is known as dereferencing the pointer. As an analogy, a page number in a book's index could be considered a pointer to the corresponding page; dereferencing such a pointer would be done by flipping to the page with the given page number and reading the text found on that page. The actual format and content of a pointer variable is dependent on the underlying computer architecture.
C99 is an informal name for ISO/IEC 9899:1999, a past version of the C programming language standard. It extends the previous version (C90) with new features for the language and the standard library, and helps implementations make better use of available computer hardware, such as IEEE 754-1985 floating-point arithmetic, and compiler technology. The C11 version of the C programming language standard, published in 2011, replaces C99.
Ecma International is a nonprofit standards organization for information and communication systems. It acquired its current name in 1994, when the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) changed its name to reflect the organization's global reach and activities. As a consequence, the name is no longer considered an acronym and no longer uses full capitalization.
Coarray Fortran (CAF), formerly known as F--, started as an extension of Fortran 95/2003 for parallel processing created by Robert Numrich and John Reid in the 1990s. The Fortran 2008 standard now includes coarrays, as decided at the May 2005 meeting of the ISO Fortran Committee; the syntax in the Fortran 2008 standard is slightly different from the original CAF proposal.
In the C programming language, data types constitute the semantics and characteristics of storage of data elements. They are expressed in the language syntax in form of declarations for memory locations or variables. Data types also determine the types of operations or methods of processing of data elements.
ISO/IEC 10967, Language independent arithmetic (LIA), is a series of standards on computer arithmetic. It is compatible with ISO/IEC/IEEE 60559:2011, more known as IEEE 754-2008, and much of the specifications are for IEEE 754 special values (though such values are not required by LIA itself, unless the parameter iec559 is true). It was developed by the working group ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG11, which was disbanded in 2011.
Programming languages are used for controlling the behavior of a machine. Like natural languages, programming languages follow rules for syntax and semantics.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to C++:
