On: IRC History by Jarkko Oikarinen

[thristian]

I think C89 introduced 'trigraphs' for exactly that reason: so people using non-ASCII ISO646 systems could have symbols that at least vaguely resembled the ones Ritchie and Kernighan intended:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraphs_and_trigraphs#C

[dietrichepp → thristian]

In Japan, they'll write C code with printf("Hello, world!¥n"); (This may be less common today.)

[TazeTSchnitzel → dietrichepp]

It's not actually. For compatibility, Japanese fonts display \ as ¥.