🚀 go-pugleaf

mcdaniel@grex.ann-arbor.mi.us (Tim McDaniel) writes:
>What is a "normative addendum"?

It seems to be the ISO's way of fixing standards that aren't broken ;-).

>What insane asylum added digraphs to the existing trigraph mess, and
>also said that the "difficult" characters have to exist anyway?  What's
>the point of trigraphs and digraphs then?

The point of trigraphs is that *terminals* don't have to have the "difficult"
characters, and that 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).  The chief "use" of trigraphs seems to be as an exchange medium;
as long as two sites agree at least on the "easy" characters' values, then a
trigraphed source on tape can be written at one site and read at the other.
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...

>What fool made these identifiers ("or", "ne", ...) reserved?
As near as I can tell, no one made those identifiers reserved; Doug Gwyn seems
to have merely suggested them as an alternative for some reason only he can
definitively comment on (but I'll bet it was to head off a THIRD (and FOURTH
and FIFTH...) insane incomprehensible mapping scheme ("characters not available
in all national character sets will be encoded as :::::0000000000:::::, where
the string of 0's shall be replaced with a CCITT checksum of the Latin-1 name
of the original character....")).