C, and what it is for

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <1988Sep27.173354.16502 at utzoo.uucp> henry at utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
[Re: trigraphs]
>Yeah, and they've turned out to be a mess and a major problem.

Actually there are no known *technical* problems with trigraphs.
The problems are all psychological and political.  Basically, the
introduction of trigraphs made it appear that X3J11 was trying to
*completely* solve the host character representation issue.
(Perhaps X3J11 indeed thought that it did, but if so it was mistaken.)
This biased the understanding of people reviewing the early dpANSes,
leading to unrealistic expectations, complaints, and suggestions that
further complicated the situation.  I believe that the decision to
introduce the notion of "multibyte character sequences" was partially
influenced by the trigraph precedent (mostly, however, by the fact that
many vendors had already been trying to make something like MBCs work).
A recent object from an ISO member shows that trigraphs are still
causing confusion and undue expectations.  Unless it is overridden
during the forthcoming reviews, I plan to clarify just what trigraphs
really do (vs. what can still be solved in other ways) in the committee
responses to the third round of public comments.  Once I have the
explanation typed up, I'll try to remember to post it here.