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Comment by noobermin | Hacker News Reader

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noobermin·

Wiki[0] says that IBM opposed the removal of trigraphs. I wonder why?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraphs_and_trigraphs#Removal...

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Because they still wanted to support some EBCDIC code pages which don't include { or }.

Is the title in the title bar related to that article? It seems like a hold-over

Thanks for a terrifying read! I shudder to think what sort of (now essentially solved) problems the engineers on those teams must have to deal with. I mean, if their code page doesn't even support [, {, }, or ], then imagine what must happen when someone tries to enter a non-english name into their system!

It's remarkable that such systems still exist (and are apparently being updated, without their foundational cracks fixed) still today!

And it's patently absurd to consider their argument that 1) they're still using trigraphs, but 2) intend to build against the C++17 spec.

FFS, if you somehow find both of these to be true, preprocess your source to convert trigraphs to the corresponding glyphs, and to a character encoding that supports them. I can't possibly believe that they're running a C++17 compiler on a system that has no support for such a character set.

Because they still sell mainframes to customers, that pay them for keeping them running as they always did.

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