sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) (07/30/89)
(This comes from comp.lang.eiffel originally. I cross-posted to comp.lang.c and .misc and directed followup to the latter group, since I see this a general language issue. And, besides, I don't read comp.lang.c.) John Cowan (cowan@marob.masa.com) = ">" Norman Diamond (diamond@csl.sony.junet) = ">>" Me = ">>>" I was testing the Eiffel compiler to see which non-ASCII characters it accepted and which it rejected. The compiler generates C as portable assembler, and one of the characters made the C compiler choke: >>> Now, what about the error the C compiler detected? The cause is >>>the very last string, which contains character 255. (Which corre- >>>sponds to lowercase dotted "y" in 8859/1.) Apparently the C compiler >>>takes this end of file. (My knowledge of C and Unix is little, but >>>isn't -1 often a code for end of file? And -1 and 255 is the same >>>thing for a byte.) >>Indeed yes. There are periodic flamefests in comp.lang.c, reminding >>C programmers that they should getchar() into a short or int, instead >>of into a char, so that they can test the int value correctly against >>the constant EOF, which is -1. Looks like some programmer wrote a >>C compiler without knowing how to use C. (This happens a lot.) >On the other hand, it would be better for the Eiffel compiler to emit >the sequence "\377" in this case, rather than the character itself. >No C program should contain characters from outside the C character set. >It's not illegal, merely a poor idea. In that case C better extends its character set pretty quick. And all other languages too. Try to convince the user with a 8859/1 that he has just made a poor choice of a character. The lowercase dotted "y" looks as legal to him as any other printable character. John Cowan the says with one character per line: >inews is a fascist Os rimply replace ">" with some other string, " >" for example. I usually don't comment signature in public, but: > Charles li reis, nostre emperesdre magnes > Set anz toz pleins at estet in Espagne. What on Earth is this for language? Galician? Provencal? -- Erland Sommarskog - ENEA Data, Stockholm - sommar@enea.se "Hey poor, you don't have to be Jesus!" - Front 242