> Strings are said to consist of printable characters, except that the > backslash escape codes can be used for non-printable characters. Is this > actually necessary? As long as I put escapes in front of quotes, > apostrophes, and backslashes (because they are lexically significant, it > seems silly for me to convert other characters to hexadecimal so that the > back end can convert them back.
C-- is an ASCII language and is intended to be readable and editable by mortal humans, including those who use editors that may not cope well with non-printing characters. > Characters (but not strings) seem to be able to involve more than eight > bits. But there seems to be no way of providing more than eight bits for > a character. Do they get zero-extended? Or sign-extended? Not without an explicit %zx or %sx they don't. > Or if I have a larger-than-eight-bits character set available, am I > just better off coding them all as integers? Yes. We wasted most of a summer trying to understand Unicode. At some point I called a halt to the circus and told everyone to return to more productive work. It wouldn't surprise me if character and string literals were left with an unpleasant intermediate design. Norman _______________________________________________ Cminusminus mailing list [email protected] https://cminusminus.org/mailman/listinfo/cminusminus
