trigraphs in X3J11

[robert yaeger]

In article <3655 at pasteur.Berkeley.Edu>, faustus at ic.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP writes:
> Nobody has said what the existing practice is with regard to European
> character sets.  Do Europeans just use an ascii keyboard when they want
> to use C?  Or do they use u-umlaut for backslash (or whatever it is)?
> Trigraphs are so ugly I can't believe anybody actually uses them, or
> will use them if they're part of C.
> 
> I think trigraphs are a trick of American terminal manufacturers who
> want to fool Europeans into thinking they can use their terminals for
> writing programs.

Well just to let you know, trigraphs are indeed needed in the good ol' USA.
Try writing MVS/c programs using a 3270! Fortunately, the only trigraphs
needed are the ??( and ??) ( ie., [ and ] ). 

The practice we've adopted is to code trigraphs only when declaring arrays.
All references to these arrays in the code use ptr arithmetic. 
This contains the ugliness of them to the declare sections.

-- 

Bob Yaeger 
uucp : ...!inhp4!bellcore!pyuxf!boby 
phone: 1-201-699-5128