Article View: comp.std.c
Article #5120Re: The \c escape
From: Scott Daniels
Date: Thu, 23 Jun 1988 01:22
Date: Thu, 23 Jun 1988 01:22
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In article <1719@ogcvax.ogc.edu> plumbc@admin.ogc.edu (Colin Plumb) writes: >I'd like to endorse this proposal. It has practical value, it breaks >nothing, and is not terribly hard to implement... >I would prefer '\ ' to '\c', since a non-alphanumeric character better >indicates the magicness of the escape, and ' ' is as close to the >"nothing" meaning of the escape as printable ASCII can get. This is a dangerous substitute, since it is impossible to look at a source file and see whether the whitespace there is a tab or a space. If you must avoid a letter (I really don't see why, every \* thing is "magic"), why not use '\_', which has the emptiness property, but is at least visually distinguishable. Also, some printing systems provide so little area for a space, it is not immediately clear whether '\n' and "\ n" are different. -Scott Daniels daniels@teklds.TEK.COM or daniels@teklds.UUCP
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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!ames!ll-xn!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!tektronix!teklds!daniels From: daniels@teklds.TEK.COM (Scott Daniels) Newsgroups: comp.std.c Subject: Re: The \c escape Summary: '\ ' has horrible problems, please avoid it. Message-ID: <3627@teklds.TEK.COM> Date: 23 Jun 88 01:22:32 GMT References: <haddock.4604> <1719@ogcvax.ogc.edu> Reply-To: daniels@teklds.UUCP (Scott Daniels) Followup-To: comp.std.c Distribution: na Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton, OR. Lines: 14