On: What does the ??!??! operator do in C?

[aidenn0]

I thought it was because of international character sets that lacked the punctuation of EBCDIC CP37 or ASCII.

[edit]

For example ISO/IEC 646 is ascii with punctuation replaced by other characters.

[Taniwha → aidenn0]

EBCDIC is very much IBM - on our old Burroughs machine we used to have to use cent signs (and something else that I forget) for square brackets and a 3-hole multipunch for ';'

[sargstuff → aidenn0]

stills leaves the issue of how to print out something that doesn't exist as a physical old style physical type face character. (way pre-dot matrix / laster printer stuff). -- aka substituting 3 characters way more informative than blank space.

[aidenn0 → sargstuff]

My (possibly wrong) understanding is that trigraphs were a late addition to the ANSI standard, which would place it in late 80s, well into the CRT terminal and dot-matrix era.