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From: roy@gitpyr.gatech.EDU (Roy Mongiovi)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Stop adding types, Let's remove Trigraphs instead!!
Message-ID: <3569@gitpyr.gatech.EDU>
Date: Thu, 14-May-87 01:25:03 EDT
Article-I.D.: gitpyr.3569
Posted: Thu May 14 01:25:03 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 16-May-87 07:49:57 EDT
References: <7264@brl-adm.ARPA> <734@sdchema.sdchem.UUCP> <293@osupyr.UUCP> <6603@amdahl.amdahl.com>
Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta
Lines: 36
Summary: Does this really seem legible to you?

In article <6603@amdahl.amdahl.com>, nw@amdahl.amdahl.com (Neal Weidenhofer) writes:
] >??=include <stdio.h>
] >main()
] >??<
] >	printf("Hello World??/???/n");
] >??>
] 
] is much to be preferred over:
] 
] e`include <stdio.h>
] main()
] E`
] 	printf("Hello World?e'");
] E'
] 
] Unfortunately, our terminals won't overstrike so you'll have to imagine
] the ` and ' on top of the e's they follow in my example.  The
] correspondences were also picked at random and probably are not accurate.

It seems to me that both are pretty illegible.
It looks a lot like substituting one unreadable code for another.
It seems to me that if you're going to break programs
(e.g. by coopting the ? character) to fix a problem,
the solution ought to be better than the problem.

I personally wouldn't program in a language that forced me
to use such kludges.  I find programming quite complicated
enough without adding illegible, non-intuitive character
mappings like the trigraphs.

But then, think of the advantages for the Obfuscated C contest.
                          :-)
-- 
Roy J. Mongiovi		Systems Analyst		Office of Computing Services
Georgia Institute of Technology		Atlanta GA  30332.	(404) 894-4660
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