Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mandrill!gatech!uflorida!novavax!proxftl!bill From: bill@proxftl.UUCP (T. William Wells) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: trigraphs in X3J11 Keywords: bizarre Message-ID: <234@proxftl.UUCP> Date: 29 May 88 03:57:51 GMT References: <5215@ico.ISC.COM> Organization: Proximity Technology, Ft. Lauderdale Lines: 29 In article <5215@ico.ISC.COM>, rcd@ico.ISC.COM (Dick Dunn) writes: > [lots of stuff demonstrating how trigraphs break existing code]. > Replacing all the nasty characters with corresponding trigraphs gives: > > if (line??(0??)=='??=' ??!??! line??(0??)=='%') ??< > prepro(&line??(1??)); > linect++; > ??> Ugh. How horrible. However, I imagine that few programmers will actually have to cope with this. As you suggest, the effort of using the trigraphs would not be well rewarded; however, mechanical translation of programs without the trigraphs into those with trigraphs would permit compilation of existing programs (and those written offline) on a machine without the characters. > A general question: Has the trigraph mechanism been tried out, in real > practice, anywhere prior to the introduction in X3J11? If so, I'd like to > hear about how it's worked out. I remember all to well writing APL on a machine that had two kinds of terminals: those with the APL character set and those without; digraphs were used for entry using the latter. I also remember the intense competition to get the terminals with the APL set. BUT, we did write an awful lot of code with the digraphs.