karl@haddock.ISC.COM (Karl Heuer) (10/23/87)
Henry Spencer writes: |For those barbarous folk who prefer hexadecimal to octal (God clearly meant |man to use octal, the thumbs are parity bits), X3J11 has added hex string |escapes. No, God clearly meant Man to use hex, storing one nibble on the non-thumb bits of each hand. Dan Tilque replies: >What's the format of these hex string escapes? "\x" followed by hex digits. This was originally going to be limited to three digits (which allows for implementations having up to 12-bit chars), but last I heard X3J11 was going to make them unlimited. I believe unlimited is the better choice, but I think the syntax should include an option to forcibly terminate the character: "\x(1B)A" for ESC-A. I know I could write "\x1B""A", but I also want to be able to write '\x(1B)A' (multi-byte character constants are implementation-defined but not illegal). Moreover, programs other than the C compiler already accept C-like escapes and will likely pick up the new mnemonics; it's unreasonable to expect them all to have string pasting too. Karl W. Z. Heuer (ima!haddock!karl or karl@haddock.isc.com), The Walking Lint