Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!lll-crg!rutgers!husc6!bu-cs!bzs From: bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: Using the Commercial At sign in C Message-ID: <3013@bu-cs.BU.EDU> Date: Fri, 19-Dec-86 00:01:18 EST Article-I.D.: bu-cs.3013 Posted: Fri Dec 19 00:01:18 1986 Date-Received: Fri, 19-Dec-86 04:48:36 EST Organization: Boston U. Comp. Sci. Lines: 25 >Neither "@", "`", or "$" can be introduced into the C standard because they >are not in all character sets (such as 7-bit European, EBCDIC?) Whoops, let's clinch this one immediately. @ and $ are certainly in EBCDIC. EBCDIC, being a 256 character set [more or less] is pretty much a super-set of ASCII. In fact, the problems with translation (and thus lossage people infer these things from) is that it sometimes defines the same characters as two different bit patterns, one for printing and the other for, I dunno, "telecommunications" and a system appears to lose if you hand it a program with the wrong one (even tho it looks right on a printout.) Actually, the "problem" is also propagated by IBM327x EBCDIC terminals which don't have {} keys and a few others that C programmers look for (but they do have 'not' and 'cents' :-) That's a problem with those ubiquitous terminals, not EBCDIC (typing in C on an ASCII terminal via an IBM7171 YALE/ASCII mux yields no problems, throw away those data-entry stations.) However, I believe TSO used @ and # as line kill and delete, as UNIX did, perhaps that's where some of this comes from (they were settable.) -Barry Shein, Boston University