C23 reference links

Posted Jul 24, 2024 15:23 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: C23 reference links by Wol
Parent article: GNU C Library 2.40 released

Because that's how ISO standards work; any standard that is referred to by an ISO standard must be included in the references for that standard. So, to refer to the platform standard from the ISO C standard requires that all the platform standards (including version) that you're referencing are in the reference list for the ISO C standard. This avoids the problem where a standard refers to a document that you can't even identify in order to purchase - if an ISO standard references a document, then a unique identifier for that document at the referenced is present in the references list.

Further, if the dependent standard is updated to a newer version, the reference remains to the older version; you have to issue a new version of the depending standard with updated references to update to the newer standard. Wording like that used by the C standard escapes this, since now the platform standard depends on the C standard, rather than the C standard depending on the platform standard.