gordan@maccs.UUCP (gordan) (05/28/88)
No one seems to have mentioned the "real" reason for trigraphs. It
seems clear that this is a "checklist" sort of feature, i.e. something
that will see no real use, but is necessary to meet certain mandatory
criteria that may be set by governments or other purchasing
organizations.
For instance, some countries in Europe may have a policy that research
organizations funded by the national government cannot purchase software
that doesn't work with that country's 7-bit ASCII national character set.
In this case, trigraphs will help ANSI C get in the door.
I seem to recall that some IBM mainframes had (have?) a bit in hardware
that enabled them to use ASCII rather than EBCDIC. Even though no
software package ever turned this bit on, its existence enabled IBM to
meet US govt. requirements that mandated ASCII capability.
In practice, ISO 8859 will see widespread use even sooner than ANSI C,
and the most popular use of trigraphs will be to liven up obfuscated C
contests.
--
Gordan Palameta
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