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From: karl@haddock.ISC.COM (Karl Heuer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: ANSI character escapes (was: Comparing chars to constants)
Message-ID: <1479@haddock.ISC.COM>
Date: Fri, 23-Oct-87 11:29:23 EST
Article-I.D.: haddock.1479
Posted: Fri Oct 23 11:29:23 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 25-Oct-87 16:06:47 EST
References: <4663@elroy.Jpl.Nasa.Gov> <31174@sun.uucp> <8792@utzoo.UUCP> <2577@zeus.TEK.COM>
Reply-To: karl@haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer)
Organization: Interactive Systems, Boston
Lines: 24

Henry Spencer writes:
|For those barbarous folk who prefer hexadecimal to octal (God clearly meant
|man to use octal, the thumbs are parity bits), X3J11 has added hex string
|escapes.

No, God clearly meant Man to use hex, storing one nibble on the non-thumb bits
of each hand.

Dan Tilque replies:
>What's the format of these hex string escapes?

"\x" followed by hex digits.  This was originally going to be limited to three
digits (which allows for implementations having up to 12-bit chars), but last
I heard X3J11 was going to make them unlimited.  I believe unlimited is the
better choice, but I think the syntax should include an option to forcibly
terminate the character: "\x(1B)A" for ESC-A.

I know I could write "\x1B""A", but I also want to be able to write '\x(1B)A'
(multi-byte character constants are implementation-defined but not illegal).
Moreover, programs other than the C compiler already accept C-like escapes and
will likely pick up the new mnemonics; it's unreasonable to expect them all to
have string pasting too.

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