Errata:  C: A Reference Manual, Third Edition

This is a cumulative list of changes and comments on Harbison and Steele's C: A Reference Manual, Third Edition, Prentice Hall, 1991.  Some or all of these problems may have been corrected in the third and later printings of the book.  Please send any additional comments to harbison@bert.pinecreek.com.

I would like to thank Aurelio Bignoli, Steve Clamage of TauMetric Corp., Roy J. Fuller of the University of Arkansas, Morris M. Kessan, George V. Reilly of Brown University, Mark Lan of Microsoft, Mike Hewett of IBM, and Steve Vegdahl for reporting problems.  I especially want to thank Steve Vinoski of HP Apollo Division, who proofread the entire third edition and reported most of problems listed here.

1  Content Problems

p. 19  In the last paragraph, the first sentence should be changed to,

"If the value of an integer constant exceeds the largest integer representable in type unsigned long, the result is undefined."

(The original sentence applied to traditional C.)

p. 38  In line 18, change "if (n !== m)" to "if (n != m)".

p. 69  In lines 21-24, the type specifier examples should be formatted into

two columns, like this:

   void			union { int a; char b; }
   int			enum {red, blue, green}
   unsigned long int	char
   my_struct_type	float

p. 82  In the first line in the table, change "int *x();" to "int x();".

p. 89  Line 9 should read

   char q[5]   = { 'A', '\0', '\0', '\0', '\0' };

to emphasize that all elements of the array are initialized.

p. 110  In line 14, change "p<array[N]" to "p<&array[N]".

p. 128  The statement following the union type syntax is incorrect--ANSI C allows

unions to contain bit fields, although traditional C does not.  Change the sentence to read:

"The syntax for defining components is the same as that used for structures.  In traditional C, unions must not contain bit fields, but in ANSI C this restriction is removed."

p. 163  In line 7, change "the promotion to float" to "the promotion to double".

p. 169  In the definition of 'primary-expression,' change 'name' to 'identifier'

and change 'literal' to 'constant.'

p. 185  In the third paragraph, change

"into its first argument a reversed copy of its second argument"
to
"into its second argument a reversed copy of its first argument".

p. 186  In the syntax for multiplicative-expression: change "cast-expression" to

"unary-expression." Alternatively, make the changes discussed section 3.1 below.

p. 197  In the first line of the table at the bottom of the page, for a=1 and b=0,

change the entry under "a||b" from 0 to 1.  [(1||0)==1]

p. 226  In the insertsort example, add a declaration of temp by changing the

existing declaration to read:

	register int i, j, temp;

p. 233  In line four, change "largest" to "smallest".

p. 287  The example illustrating strcpy is incorrect because it does not return

the original value of the argument dest.  The corrected example is shown below:

   #include <string.h>
   char *strcat(dest,src)
   	char *dest;
   	const char *src;
   {
   	char *s = dest + strlen(dest);  /* changed */
   	strcpy(s, src);
   	return dest;
   }

p. 308  In line 11, change "fputs" to "fgets".

p. 327  In the prototype for ANSI vsprintf, change the third argument

from "char *arg" to "va_list arg".

p. 328  In line 4, the variable global_trace_enabled is never used; its

declaration can be removed.

p. 335  In line 1, the sentence should begin "The function relalloc behaves like

realloc except...".

p. 350  In both prototypes for system, change "command" to "*command".

p. 364  The character for decimal code 58 is missing; it should be a colon, ':'.

p. 372  Include the change made on p. 186 on this page also.

p. 374  Change the definition of 'primary-expression' as on p. 169.

2  Typographical Problems

p. v  In the Table of Contents, section 14.2: change "Memcmp" to "memcmp".

p. 12  In the third line from the bottom, change "/*" to "/*" (font change).

p. 13  In the "Token Parsing" table footnote, change "b, -, -, x" to "b, -, -, x"

(font change).

p. 16  In the definition of constant, change floating-point-constant to

floating-constant.

p. 19  In Table 2-1, first column, the constant 077777 is in the wrong font.

p. 32ff  All even page numbers in chapter 3 should be in boldface.

p. 34  In line 29, add a period after "illegal".

p. 50  In line 4, change "name" to "name" (font change).

p. 53  In exercise 1, definitions (c) and (d) should be in the program typeface.

p. 82  In line 13, change "ary" to "ary" (font change).

p. 87  In the second line from bottom, change "element j the array" to "element j

of the array".

p. 119  The heading on this page and the next four odd-numbered pages should

be "Sec. 5.6  Structure Types."

p. 133  The references at the end of section 5.7.4 would be better placed at the end of

section 5.7.3.

p. 161  In the example code, change the characters `` and '' to ".  Also, the comment

on the last line of the example should line up with the previous comments.

p. 162  In footnote 1 of the table, change "if and only it" to "if and only if it".

p. 166  In the title on the first table, change "values" to "lvalues."

p. 177  In the references, change "void type" to "void type" (font change).

This problem appears several times in the book, but this will be the only mention of it.

p. 178  In line 7, change "modified" to "modified".

p. 184  In the second line from the bottom, change "modified" to "modified".

p. 191  In the first line, remove the space before the period ending the sentence.

At the end of the first paragraph, change "the result of applying the shift operators << and >>" to "the result of applying the shift operator >>".

p. 214  In line 6, change `"do;";' to `"do";'.

p. 214  The sixth line from the bottom of the page is not aligned properly with the

other examples.

p. 233  The eighth line from the bottom, smallest = a[j], should be indented

under the if statement, or included on the same line with the if statement.

p. 241  In line 13 and 18, the example prototypes for strncpy and fprintf differ

from the prototypes that actually appear in the ANSI C header files.  See p. 287 and p. 316 for the true prototypes.

p. 251  In line 27, change "register" to "register" (font change).

p. 272  In Table 11-3, in the entry for frac_digit, change "shwon" to "shown".

p. 273  In line 13, change "Draft Proposed ANSI C" to "ANSI C".

p. 291  In line 14 of the example program, change "woords" to "words".

p. 292  In line 3, change "woords" to "words".

p. 296  In the prototype for ANSI memchr, change "size t" to "size_t".

p. 297  In line 2 of section 14.2, change "character" to "characters".

p. 300  In last line, change "file" to "files".

p. 304  In line 3 of sec. 15.4, change "program.;" to "program;" and change "stdout"

to "stdout".

p. 308  In line 12, change "put into" to "put it into".

p. 317  In line 5 of sec. 15.11.2, change "an" to "a".

p. 318  In line 2 of sec. 15.11.3, eliminate the space before the period ending the line.

p. 320  In line 12 of sec. 15.11.6, change "L" to "L" (font change).

p. 329  In line 1 of sec. 15.14, change "takes takes" to "takes".

p. 330  In line 2 of sec. 15.15, change "filename" to "filename" (font change).

p. 330  In line 1 of sec. 15.16, change "A" to "A" (font change).

p. 344  In line 7 of sec. 18.2, change "time" to "time" (font change).

p. 345  In line -3, change "daving dime" to "saving time".

p. 352  In line 3, change "steams" to "streams" (twice).

p. 358  In line 2, the sentence should begin

"The function main, which programmers must define to establish an entry point in their C programs, is also described...".

p. 367  In the definition of constant, change floating-point-constant to

floating-constant.

p. 373  In the definition of pointer, the section numbers should be flush right.

3  Comments

3.1  The cast-expression Syntax

   multiplicative-expression:	           p. 186, 372
           cast-expression
           multiplicative-expression  mult-op  cast-expression
   
   cast-expression:	                   p. 179, 366
           unary-expression
           ( type-name ) cast-expression
   
   unary-expression:	                   p. 179, 377
           postfix-expression
           sizeof-expression
           unary-minus-expression
           unary-plus-expression
           logical-negation-expression
           bitwise-negation-expression
           address-expression
           indirection-expression
           preincrement-expression
           predecrement-expression
   
   unary-minus-expression:	           p. 181, 377
           - cast-expression
   
   unary-plus-expression:	           p. 181, 377
           + cast-expression
   
   logical-negation-expression:	           p. 182, 372
           ! cast-expression
   
   bitwise-negation-expression:	           p. 182, 366
           ~ cast-expression
   
   address-expression:	                   p. 183, 365
           & cast-expression
   
   indirection-expression:	           p. 184, 371
           * cast-expression

3.2  Declaration-list Syntax

   declaration-list :
            declaration
            declaration-list  declaration

3.3  Miscellaneous Clarifications

p. 56  The syntax for type specifiers in the book differs from that found in

other C books, although the result should be the same.  We state that only one type specifier can appear in a declaration, but we also consider "unsigned long" and "unsigned long int" to be distinct specifiers (p. 101).  Other books restrict type specifiers to be single tokens, and then permit multiple type specifiers to appear in declarations, with some constraints (e.g., see the ANSI standard, section 3.5.2).  When using our multi-token specifiers, the individual tokens need not be adjacent in the declaration, nor do they have to be in the listed order.  Of course, it is better style to keep them together and in order.

p. 167  In Table 7-1, the precedence of postfix ++ and -- should be 17 to

emphasize their symmetry with the other postfix operators.  This is not a change in the semantics.

p. 359  In the description of argv and argc, it should be mentioned that

ANSI C requires argv[argc] to be NULL.