ANSI trigraph botch -- and posthumous respect for |noalias|

Mike Threepoint linhart at topaz.rutgers.edu
Wed May 25 18:46:34 AEST 1988


?? trigraphs ought to go.  This is not very negotiable.

It's the wrong flag.  8-bit compilers should not be saddled with it.
If they are, then at least keep it out of string interpretation, where
it will break code, and \nnn can be used in it's place.  I hope I
never have to read trigraphed code from a 7-bit machine, though.

|noalias| wasn't so bad, it was just extremely badly named.  We still
need something that does what |noalias| was meant to do.  I think if
it had been called something comprehensible like, say, |discrete|, it
would not have been so unpopular.  I'll be disappointed if we lose
valuable optimizations over one confusing semantic.  (In a standard
with several... # and ## are probably the strangest operators I've
ever seen, but at least I understand them.)

Less lossitude than "tmp?????.???" not allocating a string the size
existing programs expect.  I can live with '\?', but does anyone
remember Flag Day\?\?
-- 
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