Mail Archives: djgpp/1999/09/23/18:56:06
aw AT mail1 DOT bet1 DOT puv DOT fi wrote:
: brahms AT mindspring DOT com (Stan Brown) wrote:
: > Really. Stroustrup writes about this very point in /The Design and
: > Evolution of C++/. The C programming language needs the { | } characters,
: > but Scandinavians had to type ø æ å, which are regular letters to them,
: > to get the needed ASCII codes. As you may suspect, it made for some
: > mighty strange-looking programs, so the ANSI C committee came up with
: > ugly trigraphs to work around the problem. So in C the sequences ??< and
: > ??> can be used instead of the curly braces { }, and ??! for |. (By the
: > way, | on my keyboard is a broken bar, but on my screen it's unbroken.)
: Well, I'm using a Finnish/Swedish keyboard and I've been using Swedish
: letters AND curly braces without a problem for a long time. I've used
: CP437, CP850 ("official" Swedish CP, but I prefer 437) and ISO-8859-1.
: Maybe Stroustrup is referring to older, non-PC systems, using a modified
: ASCII charset and 7-bit to represent characters?
Yes. Like Unix in the eighties.
Shostakovich, String Quartet 15,
MartinS
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