Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!spdcc!ima!haddock!karl
From: karl@haddock.ISC.COM (Karl Heuer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: "%#s"?
Message-ID: <4603@haddock.ISC.COM>
Date: 17 Jun 88 16:23:21 GMT
References:  <1988May28.222450.2680@utzoo.uucp> <1043@cresswell.quintus.UUCP> <324@proxftl.UUCP>
Reply-To: karl@haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer)
Organization: Interactive Systems, Boston
Lines: 15

In article <324@proxftl.UUCP> bill@proxftl.UUCP (T. William Wells) writes:
>You do not want to use short octal escape sequences [for %#c or %#s encoding]
>because the string "\a0" could be output as "\70" which is ambiguous.  For
>similar reasons, if X3J11 leaves in the unlimited length for "\x", those
>can't be used.

Which means that there are some strings% that can't be output at all, except
by writing every single character -- including the printable ones -- in hex.
(The string-literal-pasting kludge doesn't help here.)

I'll make one more effort in the third public review to convince X3J11 that my
\c terminator is useful.  See comp.std.c for a discussion thereof.

Karl W. Z. Heuer (ima!haddock!karl or karl@haddock.isc.com), The Walking Lint
% Consider a machine with 12-bit bytes, printable chars being 0x400-0x4ff.