harrison@necssd.NEC.COM (Mark Harrison) (06/11/90)
Did trigraphs make it into the final version of the standard?
Are there any other alternate character strings, i.e. allowing
"(| |)" to substitute for "[ ]" ?
--
Mark Harrison harrison@necssd.NEC.COM
(214)518-5050 {necntc, cs.utexas.edu}!necssd!harrison
standard disclaimers apply...gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) (06/12/90)
In article <374@necssd.NEC.COM> harrison@necssd.NEC.COM (Mark Harrison) writes: >Did trigraphs make it into the final version of the standard? Conforming implementations are obliged to recognize and translate a set of trigraph sequences (all starting with two ? characters). >Are there any other alternate character strings, i.e. allowing >"(| |)" to substitute for "[ ]" ? No, what would be the point? Trigraphs are intended solely as a means of permitting C source code to be expressed in a minimal character set (ISO 646 invariant subset of ASCII), for purposes of interchange among sites. It is not expected that anyone would type trigraph sequences on his keyboard under normal circumstances. Much better solutions to the local character set issue exist, but no one of them is appropriate to bind with the C standard, which is intended to apply universally. There is nothing in the C standard to prevent arbitrary mappings between characters that programmers deal with directly and C source characters; this is left up to local conventions (as it always has been).