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From: karl@ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Special character constants
Message-ID: <1991Jan16.200133.20145@dirtydog.ima.isc.com>
Date: 16 Jan 91 20:01:33 GMT
References: <1292@mti.mti.com>
Sender: news@dirtydog.ima.isc.com (NEWS ADMIN)
Organization: Interactive Systems
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In article <1292@mti.mti.com> adrian@mti.UUCP (Adrian McCarthy) writes:
>On a machine whose character set does not support special characters like tab
>and backspace, what happens to character constants like '\t' and '\b'?

The character constants get unique values no matter what.  I would expect that
on a tabless system the stdio library would convert '\t' into the appropriate
number of spaces when writing to a terminal.  (I thought it might even do this
for all text streams, but the standard says that filtering through a text
stream preserves tabs as well as newlines and printable characters.  Note that
backspace and other control characters do not share this property.)

Karl W. Z. Heuer (karl@ima.isc.com or uunet!ima!karl), The Walking Lint