trigraphs in X3J11

[gwyn at brl-smoke.UUCP]

In article <8805261740.AA00659 at explorer.dgp.toronto.edu> flaps at dgp.toronto.edu (Alan J Rosenthal) writes:
>Or, to put it another way, I fully expect all ansi-conforming compilers
>to come in two flavours:  a strictly conforming one and a useful one.

I've already demonstrated that trigraph mapping is virtually a non-problem,
since accidental trigraph sequences in existing code are quite rare.

As long as we're guessing about the future, what I expect to see on many
systems is a choice (perhaps via "switches", more usefully just as a
separate name for the compile command) between
	(a) backward-compatible C, probably with most of the newer
		non-conflicting Standard C features
and	(b) fully-conforming Standard C.

A vendor who tries to modify (b) to provide the vendor's notion of what
is "useful" will not be selling any compilers to me, since I will need
full (b) for my strictly conforming applications.  That is what having
a standard is all about.

The main reason for (a) on UNIX systems would be to support Reiser cpp
abuse, which many programmers have been guilty of.  Otherwise, Standard
C is pretty much upward compatible with old Random C.