wchar_t values

[Norman Diamond]

In article <ENAG.91Apr12042249 at maud.ifi.uio.no> enag at ifi.uio.no (Erik Naggum) writes:
>In article <1991Apr8.011657.1780 at tkou02.enet.dec.com> diamond at jit345.swstokyo.dec.com (Norman Diamond) writes:
>   (Some of these people originally misinterpreted the purpose of
>   trigraphs, but have figured out their error.  Some of their
>   opponents, who believe that the C language should differ from
>   country to country, misinterpreted the purpose of the Danish
>   proposal and have yet to understand their error.)
>You mean, instead of [, \, ], {, |, and } looking funny in Denmark on
>old terminals, all the C code in the world is going to lack the
>visually appealing brackets and braces?  Very clever.

No.  There should be two visually moderately appealing methods, one using
the existing tokens and one using readable, writable combinations.  IBM
once made .. equivalent to : and ., equivalent to ; in one of their languages,
but users did not have to use .. and ., unless their keypunches or printers
made it convenient.  But they could carry their card decks to machines that
had ; and : on their printers, still have .. and ., printed that way, but
still understandable to the compiler.  I once used an editor where the
combination '( was equivalent to { and ') was equivalent to }.  The use
of ' was a poor choice, and that vendor chose \ to escape things in their
newer software (such as a new operating system and programming language,
guess which ones).
--
Norman Diamond       diamond at tkov50.enet.dec.com
If this were the company's opinion, I wouldn't be allowed to post it.