Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!decwrl!pa.dec.com!jrdzzz.jrd.dec.com!tkou02.enet.dec.com!jit345!diamond From: diamond@jit345.swstokyo.dec.com (Norman Diamond) Newsgroups: comp.std.c Subject: Re: wchar_t values Message-ID: <1991Apr15.021614.12246@tkou02.enet.dec.com> Date: 15 Apr 91 02:16:14 GMT References: <1991Apr4.171657.27791@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> <15737@smoke.brl.mil> <1991Apr8.011657.1780@tkou02.enet.dec.com> Sender: usenet@tkou02.enet.dec.com (USENET News System) Reply-To: diamond@jit345.enet@tkou02.enet.dec.com (Norman Diamond) Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation Japan , Tokyo Lines: 25 In article enag@ifi.uio.no (Erik Naggum) writes: >In article <1991Apr8.011657.1780@tkou02.enet.dec.com> diamond@jit345.swstokyo.dec.com (Norman Diamond) writes: > (Some of these people originally misinterpreted the purpose of > trigraphs, but have figured out their error. Some of their > opponents, who believe that the C language should differ from > country to country, misinterpreted the purpose of the Danish > proposal and have yet to understand their error.) >You mean, instead of [, \, ], {, |, and } looking funny in Denmark on >old terminals, all the C code in the world is going to lack the >visually appealing brackets and braces? Very clever. No. There should be two visually moderately appealing methods, one using the existing tokens and one using readable, writable combinations. IBM once made .. equivalent to : and ., equivalent to ; in one of their languages, but users did not have to use .. and ., unless their keypunches or printers made it convenient. But they could carry their card decks to machines that had ; and : on their printers, still have .. and ., printed that way, but still understandable to the compiler. I once used an editor where the combination '( was equivalent to { and ') was equivalent to }. The use of ' was a poor choice, and that vendor chose \ to escape things in their newer software (such as a new operating system and programming language, guess which ones). -- Norman Diamond diamond@tkov50.enet.dec.com If this were the company's opinion, I wouldn't be allowed to post it.