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From: minow@decvax.UUCP (Martin Minow)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Stop adding types, Let's remove Trigraphs instead!!
Message-ID: <73@decvax.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 13-May-87 18:24:41 EDT
Article-I.D.: decvax.73
Posted: Wed May 13 18:24:41 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 16-May-87 07:01:02 EDT
References: <7264@brl-adm.ARPA> <734@sdchema.sdchem.UUCP> <293@osupyr.UUCP> <18598@sun.uucp> <879@eneevax.UUCP>
Reply-To: minow@decvax.UUCP (Martin Minow)
Organization: Digital Eq. Corp. - Merrimack NH.
Lines: 30

In article <879@eneevax.UUCP> chuck@eneevax.umd.edu.UUCP (Chuck Harris)
suggests removing trigraphs from the Ansi spec.  I agree with him on
this (and have motivated this in postings to the net, and in a formal
comment to the Ansi committee.  Harris asks why this was done.  The
motivation was to make C accessable to European users who have terminals
that do not image #[\]^{|}~ according to ASCII_G.  Such terminals implement
ISO standards (ISO 646-1977, ISO draft 2022.2, ISO draft 6429.2)  [I'm
not sure if all of these are relevant].  Note that the "C definition"
of these code values is not internationally standardized, but may be
(and has been) redefined by national standards.  This allowed manufacturers
to produce terminals that image alphabets used for non-English languages.

In addition to the obvious problems with trigraphs, the currrent standard
(accepted as an ISO and ANSI standard) uses the US ASCII_G definition
for the 7-bit character set, reserving a 96 character set, called
ISO Latin 1, that contains the letters needed by almost all languages
used in Western Europe.  Latin 1 is very similar, though not identical,
to "Dec Multinational" (implemented in the VT220), and has been implemented
in Dec's new VT300 series terminals.  Information on this standard was
posted to net.internat and -- I believe -- comp.lang.c a few months ago.
In general, this defines an 8-bit character set, with "Ascii" in the
low 128 code positions and "Latin 1" in the upper range.  It is possible
to transmit text in existing 7-bit environments, by the way.

Hope this clarifies matters.

Martin Minow
decvax!minow

The above does not represent the position of Digital Equipment Corporation.