# Strict C90 compliance or nothing?



## aragon (Oct 8, 2009)

Hi

I was wondering about other programmers' opinions of C standards compliance with the aim of writing portable code in this present time.

Is it considered a bad idea to use features from C99 that don't exist in C90?  For example I'm finding anonymous variadic macros (eg. #define MACRO(...)) and designated initialisers pretty useful.

Opinions/comments?


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## mrab54 (Oct 8, 2009)

I'm also curious about this.  I'm trying to learn C from a C++ background and I just had to dig up the '-std=c99' flag for gcc because it did not like how I initialized a variable in the declaration of the for loop.  I was under the assumption that C99 would be more the standard.


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## fonz (Oct 9, 2009)

aragon said:
			
		

> Is it considered a bad idea to use features from C99 that don't exist in C90?


That actually makes me wonder to what extent C99 features can be wrapped in e.g. macros/libs so that at least a C89/90 compiler won't freak out about it.

Personally, I stick to C89 but then again I'm kind of old-school 

Alphons


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