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From: barmar@mit-eddie.MIT.EDU (Barry Margolin)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: ANSI C -- trigraphs and character sets
Message-ID: <4328@mit-eddie.MIT.EDU>
Date: Thu, 18-Dec-86 02:31:21 EST
Article-I.D.: mit-eddi.4328
Posted: Thu Dec 18 02:31:21 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 18-Dec-86 07:36:09 EST
References: <106@decvax.UUCP> <5453@brl-smoke.ARPA> <12304@watnot.UUCP>
Reply-To: barmar@eddie.MIT.EDU (Barry Margolin
Organization: MIT, EE/CS Computer Facilities, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 18
Xref: mnetor comp.lang.c:456 comp.std.internat:58

In article <12304@watnot.UUCP> ccplumb@watnot.UUCP (Colin Plumb) writes:
>>We (they, actually; that was before my time) tried to do
>>essentially that once...
>Seriously, if "before your time" means any significant number of years, they
>should try again.

X3J11 has only been in existence for a couple of years, which I think is
less than "any significant number of years."  If they ran up against
significant pressures then, they most likely will again.  IBM hasn't
dropped EBCDIC, but there are lots of people who want to use C on IBM
equipment.  The C standard takes many pains to be character set
independent; I remember lots of flaming on mod.std.c about how to word
the descriptions of \r, \n, \g, etc., so that they would not obviously
discriminate against non-ASCII implementations.
-- 
    Barry Margolin
    ARPA: barmar@MIT-Multics
    UUCP: ..!genrad!mit-eddie!barmar