Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!oberon!cit-vax!beckenba
From: beckenba@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu (Joe Beckenbach)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: trigraphs in X3J11
Message-ID: <6626@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
Date: 21 May 88 03:49:34 GMT
References: <5215@ico.ISC.COM> <7937@brl-smoke.ARPA> <10626@apple.Apple.Com>
Reply-To: beckenba@cit-vax.UUCP (Joe Beckenbach)
Organization: California Institute of Technology
Lines: 29

---

	I'm not sure how nit-picky a detail this is, but the impression I've
gotten from the trigraph postings of late is that the compiler would rather
not deal with it.
	Isn't that what a preprocessor is for?
	(Or is the preprocessor considered part of the compiler?)

	For C code using trigraphs, I assume that judicious use of spacing
will ease matters, eg
	{int garbage[MAX];}
goes to 
	??<  int garbage??( MAX ??) ; ??>
much more legibly than a direct substitution without spacing
	??<int garbage??(MAX??);??>
Of course trigraphs mean more characters in a source file. But spaces and
\n's are cheap, or at least were until the compiler broke. :-)

	BTW, I had to program on an old IBM4381 workstation in Pascal. There
was no way to get the curly braces AT ALL from the keyboard; the language
support kludge was a trigraph sequence. It worked, but it was hard to spot
the comments for a while. The machine could display the curly braces, but
the machine couldn't generate them from any of the input devices! [Bad
design in action. :-( ]

-- 
Joe Beckenbach	beckenba@csvax.caltech.edu	Caltech 1-58, Pasadena CA 91125
Graduating in June, knowing that C ain't bad, tools exist and are useful, 
	and that digital watches could be a neat idea. :-)