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Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!husc6!rutgers!clyde!ima!haddock!karl
From: karl@haddock.UUCP (Karl Heuer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Stop adding types, Let's remove Trigraphs instead!!
Message-ID: <545@haddock.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 11-Jun-87 18:10:13 EDT
Article-I.D.: haddock.545
Posted: Thu Jun 11 18:10:13 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 20-Jun-87 12:49:19 EDT
References: <1266@cullvax.UUCP>
Reply-To: karl@haddock.ISC.COM.UUCP (Karl Heuer)
Organization: Interactive Systems, Boston
Lines: 17

In article <1266@cullvax.UUCP> drw@cullvax.UUCP (Dale Worley) writes:
>No, you can process [trigraphs with] a preprocessor, but still, any program
>that contains "???" and doesn't use it to mean "?" is non-conforming.  So
>even if you don't use the preprocessor, you can't escape from its shadow.
>(Though I don't think trigraphs are really so bad.)

A nit here.  "???" is not a trigraph for "?"; in particular "???=" represents
"?#" rather than "?=".  (I.e. it's the character "?" followed by the trigraph
"??=".)  To prevent an apparent trigraph from being interpreted as such, one
must backslash the second question mark.  For example, the program that prints
	The trigraph for \ is ??/
looks like this in ASCII:
	main() { printf("The trigraph for \\ is ?\?/\n"); }
or, in a less complete alphabet, like this:
	main() ??< printf("The trigraph for ??/??/ is ???/?/??/n"); ??>

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