On 8/17/2012 15:57, clipka wrote:
> Well, the trigraphs were there for /non/ English-based computers, which
> often used 7-bit national derivatives of ASCII.

Trigraphs were there for computers using EBCDIC, 6-bit bytes, and so on.

> Those typically replaced a
> common set of 8 characters - curly braces, square brackets, pipe symbol,
> backslash, tilde and hash - with language-specific characters (in the German
> "GSCII", for instance, those were the umlauts, the sz ligature, and the
> German paragraph sign), so C programs without trigraphs would look pretty
> odd on those computers.

Well, that too. But I think it was more for being able to code C on punched 
cards than it was replacing umlauts with equally-unreadable trigraphs.

> BTW, the UK also had their own derivative of ASCII, replacing the hash sign
> with a pound sterling sign, but AFAIR the other characters were left unharmed.

That's why Americans sometimes call # the "pound sign".

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "They're the 1-800-#-GORILA of the telecom business."

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