trigraphs in X3J11

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <4314 at haddock.ISC.COM> karl at haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer) writes:
>However, some external representation of this character has to exist anyway.
>After all, I can do putc('#', outf) to a text stream and read it back in,
...
>Rebuttal, anyone?

How can it be rebutted?  It's exactly correct, and is why I think
trigraphs were unnecessary in the first place.

Note: the code might be written "putc('??=', outf)" but it's still
a distinct character represented in the proposed C standard by the
glyph "#".  Sites that want to import strictly conforming programs
have to be able to handle non-trigraph sources anyway.  Trigraphs
are a (poor) solution to the wrong problem.