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 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.