ANSI C is the standard published by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) for the C programming language. Software developers writing in C are encouraged to conform to the requirements in the document, as it encourages easily portable code. ANSI C is now supported by almost all the widely used compilers. Most of the C code being written nowadays is based on ANSI C. Any program written only in standard C and without any hardware dependent assumptions is virtually guaranteed to compile correctly on any platform with a conforming C implementation.