[TUHS] What would early alternatives to C have been?

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2025-03-10T22:18:43-0400, John Levine wrote:
> I suspect that's because they came along just late enough that
> everything used ASCII, and they got those cool Model 37 Teletypes, so
> they could assume that devices could generate and print punctuation
> like { } [ ] | < >

"begin" and "end" were fine.

I've heard a story that Pascal was unpopular in the Middle East;
every programming student wanted to know why they had to pay homage to
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in every program, which tells you
how old this story is.

> The C standards used to have (still have?) trigraph equivalents for
> much of the punctuation for people on systems that don't have the
> characters.

My understanding of the feedback procedure for ISO C23 finalization is
that some NBs (national bodies) fought pretty hard to keep trigraphs.

I _think_ they're gone from the final version of the standard, but I
don't have an official version, just a "final" draft, and my impression
of the WG14 meeting minutes from last year was that this particular
issue was fought to the bitter end.

So maybe they snuck back in at the 11th hour.

Regards,
Branden
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