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From: Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Top 10 most common hard skills listed on resumes...
Date: Sun, 8 Sep 2024 06:39:38 +0200
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On 01.09.2024 22:07, Tim Rentsch wrote:
> 
> [...]  The most important purpose of
> the ISO C standard is to be read and understood by ordinary C
> developers, not just compiler writers.  [...]

Is that part of a preamble or rationale given in the C standard?

That target audience would surely surprise me. Myself I've programmed
in quite some programming languages and never read a standard document
of the respective language, nor did I yet met any programmer who have
done so. All programmer folks I know used text books to learn and look
up things and specific documentation that comes with the compiler or
interpreter products. (This is of course just a personal experience.)

I've also worked a lot with standards documents in various areas
(mainly ISO and ITU-T standards but also some others). Almost none of
these standards (if they were substantial ones[*]) were suited for
"ordinary users". I used them to _implement_ the respective services
or protocols. But what they describe, and how they describe things,
is by far not the way that would fit "ordinary users".

That's why I immediately see the necessity that compiler creators need
to know them in detail to _implement_ "C". And that's why I cannot see
how the statement of the C-standard's "most important purpose" would
sound reasonable (to me). I mean, what will a programmer get from the
"C" standard that a well written text book doesn't provide? After all
the compiler vendor has to guarantee a conformance (or disclose any
non-conformances).

I met languages feature, implementation, and environment differences
in various, e.g., C++ compilers I used in the past. The requirements
we had to fulfill were to create products for various platforms with
differences in their C++ environments. A restriction to the standard
features were one point we learned from the compilers' descriptions,
and much things beyond that had anyway been non-standard (like, e.g.,
template handling).

YMMV, of course.

Janis

[*] By substantial I mean extensive ones like the ITU-T X.500 series
and similar, not trivial ones like, say, the ISO 8601).