Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!umd5!uvaarpa!mcnc!rti!sas!bts
From: bts@sas.UUCP (Brian T. Schellenberger)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: trigraphs in X3J11
Message-ID: <521@sas.UUCP>
Date: 30 May 88 02:58:28 GMT
References: <5215@ico.ISC.COM> <10949@apple.Apple.Com>
Reply-To: bts@sas.UUCP (Brian T. Schellenberger)
Organization: SAS Institute Inc, Cary NC
Lines: 26

In article <10949@apple.Apple.Com> lenoil@apple.UUCP (Robert Lenoil) writes:
|In article <5215@ico.ISC.COM> rcd@ico.ISC.COM (Dick Dunn) writes:
|>    Note also that it is common practice to use "?" in initializing strings
|>    where the "?" positions will be replaced at execution time.
|
|Dick is dead right here.  What is the justification for breaking existing
|programs when the ability to include untypeable characters into strings already
|exists via the \xxx mechanism?  Instead of introducing a totally new notion
|(to C, anyway) of trigraphs, why not simply extend the backslash escape
|mechanism to be valid outside of strings?  This would allow the use of #defines
|to perform the same function as trigraphs:
|
|#define ??< \173	/* open brace */
|#define ??> \175	/* close brace */

No, you are both DEAD WRONG here.  This will break badly on the IBM, PR1ME,
and other non-ASCII machines.

You should *NEVER* assume anything (that the ANSI C standard doesn't guarantee)
about the character set in portable programs.  And if your program isn't
intended to be portable, ANSI is irrelevent anyway.
-- 
--Brian, the man from
  Babble-on.                |Brian T. Schellenberger| ...!mcnc!rti!sas!bts     |
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