11 Mar
2025
11 Mar
'25
4 a.m.
At 2025-03-10T22:18:43-0400, John Levine wrote:
I suspect that's because they came along just
late enough that
everything used ASCII, and they got those cool Model 37 Teletypes, so
they could assume that devices could generate and print punctuation
like { } [ ] | < >
"begin" and "end" were fine.
I've heard a story that Pascal was unpopular in the Middle East;
every programming student wanted to know why they had to pay homage to
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in every program, which tells you
how old this story is.
The C standards used to have (still have?) trigraph
equivalents for
much of the punctuation for people on systems that don't have the
characters.
My understanding of the feedback procedure for ISO C23 finalization is
that some NBs (national bodies) fought pretty hard to keep trigraphs.
I _think_ they're gone from the final version of the standard, but I
don't have an official version, just a "final" draft, and my impression
of the WG14 meeting minutes from last year was that this particular
issue was fought to the bitter end.
So maybe they snuck back in at the 11th hour.
Regards,
Branden