[net.lang.c] mod.std.c Digest Volume 4 : Issue 14

sde@Mitre-Bedford (03/13/85)

   |My personal view is that the
   |occurrence of trigraph escapes in the same file as non-ISO characters
   |(i.e., stuff written both ways) should be cause for an error message.
   |This would at least simplify conversion.

It may be a blind spot on my part, but how is the compiler to know
that 
	"??<whatever> ... \<whatever>" 
is not really,
	"??<whatever> ... <Nat'l char><whatever>",
which ought to be permissible?

David   sde@mitre-bedford

henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (03/15/85)

>    |My personal view is that the
>    |occurrence of trigraph escapes in the same file as non-ISO characters
>    |(i.e., stuff written both ways) should be cause for an error message.
>    |This would at least simplify conversion.
> 
> It may be a blind spot on my part, but how is the compiler to know
> that 
> 	"??<whatever> ... \<whatever>" 
> is not really,
> 	"??<whatever> ... <Nat'l char><whatever>",
> which ought to be permissible?

The compiler has to know what character code its input is using, so
it already knows whether an octal 0134 is a backslash or something
else.  The situation in which I propose an error message can arise
only in an ASCII compiler.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry