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From: aeb@mcvax.cwi.nl (Andries Brouwer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: draft ANSI standard: trigraphs rear their ugly heads again
Message-ID: <1442@mcvax.cwi.nl>
Date: Wed, 3-Dec-86 12:40:13 EST
Article-I.D.: mcvax.1442
Posted: Wed Dec  3 12:40:13 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 3-Dec-86 22:16:28 EST
References: <1381@hoptoad.uucp>
Reply-To: aeb@mcvax.UUCP (Andries Brouwer)
Organization: CWI, Amsterdam
Lines: 27
Xref: mnetor comp.lang.c:218 comp.std.internat:10

In article <1381@hoptoad.uucp> gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) writes:
>...
>My preliminary answers are:  C programs that use ASCII characters had
>damn well better be strictly conforming, or every C program in the world
>is broken.  C compilers on European machines could support the national
>letters in identifiers and such, but any program that used this feature
>would not be portable.
>
>Since a European C compiler which supported using the local characters
>AS LETTERS would encourage unportable code, it would be better to make
>European C compilers which did not support using the local characters
>as letters.  This is tough, but are we trying to be nice or are we
>trying to encourage portability?

What you ask, in fact, is that everybody in the world use english
when programming. In Danish, for example, {,|, and } are three major
vowels, like a, o and u in English. What would you say if I were to
suggest that you'd better avoid a's, o's and u's in your identifiers?

Your view about non-portability is a bit too pessimistic.
It would be very easy to modify existing compilers to accept
a pragmat (compiler directive) like
#letter "{|}"
so that each source program could define its set of letters used
in identifiers. Of course, one has to use trigraphs for the symbols
lost this way, but I can assure you that that is much to be preferred
above seeing letters in places where one expects punctuation.