3.3.1 ANSI/ISO

Occasionally a valid ANSI/ISO program may be incompatible with the extensions in GNU C. To deal with this situation, the compiler option -ansi disables those GNU extensions which are in conflict with the ANSI/ISO standard. On systems using the GNU C Library (glibc) it also disables extensions to the C standard library. This allows programs written for ANSI/ISO C to be compiled without any unwanted effects from GNU extensions.

For example, here is a valid ANSI/ISO C program which uses a variable called asm:

#include <stdio.h>

int
main (void)
{
  const char asm[] = "6502";
  printf ("the string asm is '%s'\n", asm);
  return 0;
}

The variable name asm is valid under the ANSI/ISO standard, but this program will not compile in GNU C because asm is a GNU C keyword extension (it allows native assembly instructions to be used in C functions). Consequently, it cannot be used as a variable name without giving a compilation error:

$ gcc -Wall ansi.c
ansi.c: In function `main':
ansi.c:6: parse error before `asm'
ansi.c:7: parse error before `asm'

In contrast, using the -ansi option disables the asm keyword extension, and allows the program above to be compiled correctly:

$ gcc -Wall -ansi ansi.c
$ ./a.out 
the string asm is '6502'

For reference, the non-standard keywords and macros defined by the GNU C extensions are asm, inline, typeof, unix and vax. More details can be found in the GCC Reference Manual "Using GCC" (see section Further reading).

The next example shows the effect of the -ansi option on systems using the GNU C Library, such as GNU/Linux systems. The program below prints the value of pi, \pi=3.14159..., from the preprocessor definition M_PI in the header file 'math.h':

#include <math.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int 
main (void) 
{
  printf ("the value of pi is %f\n", M_PI);
  return 0;
}

The constant M_PI is not part of the ANSI/ISO C standard library (it comes from the BSD version of Unix). In this case, the program will not compile with the -ansi option:

$ gcc -Wall -ansi pi.c
pi.c: In function `main':
pi.c:7: `M_PI' undeclared (first use in this function)
pi.c:7: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
pi.c:7: for each function it appears in.)

The program can be compiled without the -ansi option. In this case both the language and library extensions are enabled by default:

$ gcc -Wall pi.c
$ ./a.out 
the value of pi is 3.141593

It is also possible to compile the program using ANSI/ISO C, by enabling only the extensions in the GNU C Library itself. This can be achieved by defining special macros, such as _GNU_SOURCE, which enable extensions in the GNU C Library:⁽¹¹⁾

$ gcc -Wall -ansi -D_GNU_SOURCE pi.c
$ ./a.out 
the value of pi is 3.141593

The GNU C Library provides a number of these macros (referred to as feature test macros) which allow control over the support for POSIX extensions (_POSIX_C_SOURCE), BSD extensions (_BSD_SOURCE), SVID extensions (_SVID_SOURCE), XOPEN extensions (_XOPEN_SOURCE) and GNU extensions (_GNU_SOURCE).

The _GNU_SOURCE macro enables all the extensions together, with the POSIX extensions taking precedence over the others in cases where they conflict. Further information about feature test macros can be found in the GNU C Library Reference Manual (see section Further reading).