Dumb question: What IS a trigraph?

[Bjorn Engsig]

Article <10762 at smoke.BRL.MIL> by gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) says:
|Unless you're importing a lot of code from
|European sites or are implementing a C compiler, you shouldn't have to
|be concerned about trigraphs, ...
Well, I don't think that any Europeans use trigraphs.  We use one of the alter-
natives:

- Get a terminal like yours (i.e. US-style) and give a damm about our own
  funny characters - we never program in our own language anyway.

- Use a terminal (and software such as vi, sh, etc.) with 8-bit support

- Use nationalized terminals, where e.g. } looks like an 'a' with a small
  ring above it (try typing ComposeCharacter a * on a vt220).  You can 
  actually get used to such ugly looking C programs :-(


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Bjorn Engsig, ORACLE Europe         \ /    "Hofstadter's Law:  It always takes
Path:   mcvax!orcenl!bengsig         X      longer than you expect, even if you
Domain: bengsig at oracle.nl           / \     take into account Hofstadter's Law"