Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!uupsi!sunic!maxim!prc From: prc@erbe.se (Robert Claeson) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: How can I de-escape my strings at run time? Message-ID: <1600@hulda.erbe.se> Date: 7 Jun 90 11:46:23 GMT References: <6550.26639B0A@puddle.fidonet.org> <2596@litchi.bbn.com> Organization: ERBE DATA AB, Jarfalla, Sweden Lines: 26 In article , peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes: > > That's why there are trigraphs. > > Does anyone actually use them for work? It seems to me they're pretty much > unusable in practice except for transferring code between environments. Glad you asked. Yes, trigraphs are used for work, especially when not in an ASCII environment. EBCDIC, for example, doesn't have brackets and braces, so C programmers in an EBCDIC environment are more or less forced to use trigraphs. Most national variants of the ISO 646 7-bit character set (except for the U.S. and U.K. variants) doesn't have them either, but programmers have learned to use whatever character that happens to have the same character code as the special characters. For example, using the Swedish variant of ISO 646, '[' is substituted with the alphabetical character A-diaeresis, '^' is substituted with U-diaeresis, '~' is substituted with u-diaeresis and so on. There is at least good to have a standard for the 'special characters'. Pascal programmers in an EBCDIC environment has to use .( and .) instead of [ and ], but there's no standard for that so it is not portable. -- Robert Claeson E-mail: rclaeson@erbe.se ERBE DATA AB