The C programming language is missing library functions min and max for integer types. I am not aware of any argument to not provide them, given virtually every programming language providing them.

Relevance

For floats and doubles, fmin and fmax exists, but not for integer types. Other programming language provide them including C++ by std::min and std::max. Several C libraries provide them too, e.g., Linux, SuperLU, Cairo. Stackoverflow has a question with more then 400 upvotes, indicating that this is a real issue.

Add to C language?

Is it worthwhile to write a paper suggesting the addition of min and max? Or is there a reason that their addition has not already happened?

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to find the maximum and minimum values in a C array, but I'm running into a problem. My code calculates the maximum value correctly, but the minimum value is always a very large negative number, even when all the values in the array are positive.

I've tried initializing the min variable to a large positive number, but it doesn't seem to help.

Here's my code:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
    int i, sum = 0;
    int numbers [5];
    int min, max, average;
    
    printf("enter 5 numbers:\n");
    
    for (i = 0; i < 5; i++)
    {
        scanf("%d", &numbers[i]);
        sum += numbers[i];
    }
    
    max = numbers[i];
    min = numbers[i];
    
    for (i = 0; i < 5 ; i++)
    {
        if (numbers[i] > max)
        {
            max = numbers[i];
        }
        if (numbers[i] < min)
        {
            min = numbers[i];
        }
        
    }
    
    average = (double)sum/5;
    
    printf("Average is %d and sum is %d\n", average, sum);
    printf("Max number is %d and the min number is %d\n", max, min);
    
}

Can anyone help me figure out what's going wrong?

Thanks!