ANSI C -- trigraphs and character sets

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <106 at decvax.UUCP> minow at decvax.UUCP (Martin Minow) writes:
>Page 10, line 1ff. The Standard should recognize the primacy of the ISO
>Latin 1 character set.

We (they, actually; that was before my time) tried to do
essentially that once, but immediately ran up against the
problem that some important vendors much prefer EBCDIC.
There doesn't seem to be any strong logical argument for
forbidding reasonable non-ISO-conforming character sets.

>Page 10, line 34ff. Trigraphs should be deleted from the standard.

I could easily back such a proposal; trigraphs appear to be
a remnant of a premature attempt to cope with
internationalization and are probably neither necessary nor
desirable.

The above remarks are by no means official X3J11 positions;
please go ahead and send in your suggestions to ANSI.