Bacon, Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, Explosives

In 2005, when I went to work for Microsoft, I bought a new LCD for cheap. Seven years on, I finally bought a small upgrade – mostly so I can go back to a dual-head setup. What strikes me most is how very, very yellow the older monitor is. This may be a feature of LED versus LCD, or it may be a feature of age; whatever the reason, I can hardly look at my older monitor now. At this point, I’m keeping it on my desk because it has an integrated USB hub and the replacement monitor doesn’t; I’m sure, in a few weeks, I’ll reclaim the space used by the monitor. In fact, I think that day is the second of May, or perhaps the evening thereof.

Did you know production of liquid oxygen is really easy? Did you know liquid oxygen is paramagnetic? I knew neither of these things.

What they’re asking for is a phone number. Thanks for being opaque, Verizon!

Neat film on wave systems and impedance matching. I dig the wave machines!

It sucks when you’re searching for someone that shares a name with a famous person; I wish there was a way to say “no, not that Famous Name” and have Bing or Google subtract all results known to be about the famous person. Also, searching for someone named after a place is almost impossible; worse yet when the last name is shared by someone mildly famous from that place. Imagine having gone to school with Indianapolis Payton or worked with Dallas Cuban; give up, the information you seek is lost in the chaff.

Nobody guessed in the comments, so I’ll go ahead and answer. Trigraphs were added to C89 because ISO-646 (“Invariant ASCII”) was not rich enough to express C.

The solution is an internationally agreed-upon repertoire, in terms of which an international representation of C can be defined. The ISO has defined such a standard:ISO 646 describes aninvariant subset of ASCII. The characters in the ASCII repertoire used by C and absent from the ISO 646 repertoire are: #[]{}\|~^ Given this repertoire, the Committee faced the problem of defining representations for the absent characters. The obvious idea of defining two-character escape sequences fails because C uses all the characters which are in the ISO 646 repertoire: no single escape character is available. The best that can be done is to use a trigraph – an escape digraph followed by a distinguishing character. ?? was selected as the escape digraph because it is not used anywhere else in C (except as noted below); it suggests that something unusual is going on. The third character was chosen with an eye to graphical similarity to the character being represented.

Since digraphs were out for C89, how did they end up in C99? They were imported from AMD1 (Amendment 1), AKA C95. Why were they added? Trigraphs are ugly.

C90 addresses the problem in a different way. It provides replacements at the level of individual characters using three-character sequences called trigraphs (see §5.2.1.1). For example, ??< is entirely equivalent to {, even within a character constant or string literal. While this approach provides a solution for the known limitations of EBCDIC (except for the exclamation mark) and ISO/IEC 646, the result is arguably not highly readable.

Thus, AMD1 provides a set of more readable digraphs (see §6.4.6). These are two-character alternate spellings for several of the operators and punctuators that can be hard to read with ISO/IEC 646 national variants. Trigraphs are still required within character constants and string literals, but at least the more common operators and punctuators can have more suggestive spellings using digraphs.

Not what I thought, either.

In order to resolve a geek fight (not in my favor, I might add), I dug in and found out when and why di- and trigraphs were added to the C programming language. Without using a search engine, do you know when and why? Hint: the answer has nothing to do with keyboards.

Answer in a day or two, unless someone pipes up in the comments.

I threw all my knives in the garbage when I saw knives that inject CO2 into your target. $400, too; what a bargain!

however, you won’t get any closer to the cheddar. Explains the comment I got this morning.