🚀 go-pugleaf

Jeez, Doug, for a second there I actually believed you were seriously
suggesting people should use `not' for `!'.  But are those digraphs
really going to be suggested to be added to C?

jfw@ksr.com (John F. Woods):
> the "difficult" characters don't need to have the same representations
> between implementations (and may well not, in an environment where
> national characters have gobbled up the ASCII values for the
> "difficult" characters).

Does anyone, anywhere on the world know of a serious implementation of
C that uses mostly ASCII but doesn't recognize the value 0x7b as left
brace?  (Totally regardless of what that character looks like on a
terminal - on mine, it looks like an 'a' with two dots; compilers have
*no* problems with that.)

A language standard simply should not concern itself with what
characters look like on various terminals.  The "national characters
need trigraphs" argument is just plain WRONG.

> Of course, why it was necessary to do violence to the language in
> order to avoid having an occasional tape accompanied by a
> handwritten note and/or a quickie conversion utility has escaped
> many people...

Exactly!  The C standard could even have required C systems to be able
to process ASCII source code; whether that is implemented by the native
character set, as a compiler option, or as a separate program, is up to
the implementation.  As is the exact key sequence required to enter a
"left brace" token (even if it is ??( or $$( and displays as three
characters on some terminals!)

Trigraphs are BAD and UNNECESSARY.
Digraphs are WORSE and UNNECESSARY.
									++sja