idC: A Subset of Standard C for Initial Teaching

A subset of the programming language ISO Standard C is defined informally. It is claimed that the resulting language (called idC) is suitable for introductory programming classes for university-level students. The claim comes with a caveat that the language requires a certain level of software support not normally mandated (e.g. by the C standard). After justifying each restriction, a sketch of the first prototype implementation is presented. idC may well be a suitable ‘workhorse’ language to introduce concurrently with, or shortly after, a functional programming language such as Haskell or SML. ∗Copyright 1992. All rights reserved. Reproduction of all or part of this work is permitted for educational or research purposes on condition that (1) this copyright notice is included, (2) proper attribution to the author or authors is made and (3) no commercial gain is involved. Technical Reports issued by the Department of Computer Science, Manchester University, are available by anonymous ftp from m1.cs.man.ac.uk (130.88.13.4) in the directory /pub/TR. The files are stored as PostScript, in compressed form, with the report number as filename. Alternatively, reports are available by post from The Computer Library, Department of Computer Science, The University, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, U.K.