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Comment by chromatin | Hacker News Reader

Wow, and I thought I knew C pretty well. Great post.

edited to add: I really like "Modern C" and just re-checked -- no mention of the preprocessor feature!

https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02383654/file/ModernC.pdf

I think the only remaining purpose for trigraphs is when you are at the very end of a C interview, and your amazing candidate has answered every question perfectly, and you just have to find something they might not know about--only then do you reach for the trigraphs.

Gasp! You mean they've heard the volatile question before?

The register keyword is far more interesting.

How about the restrict keyword.

Wow, I know all these. I only recently discovered bit addressing in C though.

Why would you do this? Some weird insecurity?

Salary negotiating leverage? The worst they feel the more likely they accept to be lowballed

Haha no! When a candidate is that awesome, I sometimes get morbidly curious about whether there is actually an end to that depth of knowledge or if it just goes on forever. At that point, they already have the "HIRE" classification and I'm pretty much in awe!

I love it when a candidate blows through my easy, medium and hard questions and leaves me scrambling.

No, that’s the next-to-last question. If they know that, you ask about digraphs

  <: and :> are [ and ]
  <% and %> are { and }
  %: is #

(since C99, and expanded a bit later than trigraphs)

‘Unfortunately’, none of the characters used here can be coded using trigraphs, so you can’t use trigraphs to generate digraphs in source.

A very long time ago I had to write some throwaway code on a laptop with an European keyboard with {} in very inconvenient positions (requiring pressing the alt key). I resorted to digraphs and I don't regret it.

I think C also has the elusive "down to" operator.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/1642035

"-->" is not an operator in the C language, it's just a way of writing the unary operator "--" and comparison operator ">" together without any whitespace between them, since whitespace is ignored by the lexer.

Have any of you downvoters read the C grammar? There is no --> operator in C. I'll never understand some people.

I didn't downvote you but I presume others did because the StackOverflow post I linked to essentially says the same thing.

Honestly, I thought this was about a programming language called C? rather than C.

In the spirit of C++ and C#, there could be a C?'1':'0'

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