David M. Keaton

Background

I am a computer and telecommunications consultant in several areas including computer architecture, compilers, and wireless communication.  I also provide training in C, C++, and Unix.  I have been active on the ANSI and ISO C committees for over 10 years.  I created the ISO C committee's ftp archive.

I am a member-at-large of ICANN, the organization that oversees domain names and IP addresses.  With any luck, new top-level domains will relieve some of the demand, since domain name scarcity continues to be a problem.

Resources

Postscript and text documents.

• The ISO C committee's ftp archive.  These are documents that proposed extensions and changes to the C language.  Several of them were adopted for the most recent version of the language, C99.

  There is an official European mirror of the ISO C committee's ftp archive.  If you are in Europe, you might get better performance from the mirror.

  Note that the ISO C committee's web site is now more up to date than the ftp site.  The ftp site is retained for historical access to some older documents.

HTML documents.

• Designated Initializers, a paper by David Prosser and myself describing an extension to C language initializers.  This was adopted in C99.
• Compound Literals, another paper by David Prosser and myself.  This describes an extension to the C language that provides a way to create unnamed aggregate temporaries with a known value.  It was adopted in C99.
• Nonzero Default Initial Values, a proposal of mine to provide the static portion of the functionality of C++ constructors in C.  It was rejected for inclusion in C99.
• See Bjarne Stroustrup's 1986 statements on the feature set of today's C++.