On: C++ and the Culture of Complexity (2013)

[pjc50]

> why does C++ still support

Stop right there! There is plenty of evidence that removing features from a language is fatal to adoption. Both Perl and Python have suffered from this.

Specifically for trigraphs (apart from these, EBCDIC support doesn't affect compilers on other systems) IBM have a vote and they voted not to remove it: https://isocpp.org/files/papers/N4210.pdf

[sstanie → pjc50]

How has Python suffered from this? They broke things going from 2 to 3... and it was still the fastest growing language from 2017. It clearly wasn't popular just because they removed features, but you can't say that removing things is fatal to adoption.

[gpderetta → pjc50]

IIRC they did lose the final vote though, and trigraphs is one of the few features ever removed from C++.

[72deluxe → gpderetta]

I miss them - I enjoyed being able to write ??=include at the top of my files.

[gpderetta → 72deluxe]

Hey, digraphs are still there, they are almost as much fun as trigraph!