From: vcarlos35 AT juno DOT com
To: pete AT restall DOT net
Cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 1998 16:29:51 EDT
Subject: Re: Trigraphs ???
Message-ID: <19981001.162957.5903.1.vcarlos35@juno.com>
References: <199810011750 DOT NAA29390 AT indy DOT delorie DOT com>
X-Mailer: Juno 1.49
X-Juno-Line-Breaks: 0-9,11-13

> Hi people.  I'm just posting to ask what a 'Trigraph' is ?  The GCC
> documentation says I 'don't want to know about this brain-damage'.

A horrible decision by the ANSI committee. IIRC, they are three
letter sequences beginning with "??" that are interpreted as one 
letter because some people who use international keyboards don't 
have brackets, braces, etc. One of the biggest faults is that they 
can often change the meaning of valid code, unlike digraphs, which
rarely affect normal code.
If you want to see a example of how evil trigraphs are, there was an 
entry to the Obsfucated C Code Contest a few years ago that was rather
ugly.

Karl

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