Thread: What the heck is ??(??)

I'm have coded in c for a while but I've come across some source code that contains something I've never seen:

char in_proc ??(??) = "INITIAL PROCEDURE";

I have no idea what ??(??) does in this case. Does this make me a terrible c programmer? Could someone explain what it does?

Best regards,

Rembi

Must be in a commented section. It's illegal.

It's not illegal at all. Look up "Digraphs and trigraphs" on Wikipedia.

so according to the wiki ??(??) = []

Good to know, now I can buy those cheep keyboards missing some keys..

I have never run into any code with them, but don't see too much C code these days at work

Dylan

Thanks for the reply guys, much appreciated

Rembi

Thanks, rabidbadger and anon. I learned something. Bizarre. I've never seen a shortage of "[", "]", etc. in a character set that was limited to 7 bits. ASCII was perfectly adequate for the job and did not require digraphs. And I come from using paper tape on a teletype.

So as I understand it, the C committee in 1994 decided to make C compatible with character encoding that is already over 20 years old and long obsolete. Way to go!

Originally Posted by nonoob

Thanks, rabidbadger and anon. I learned something. Bizarre. I've never seen a shortage of "[", "]", etc. in a character set that was limited to 7 bits. ASCII was perfectly adequate for the job and did not require digraphs. And I come from using paper tape on a teletype.

So as I understand it, the C committee in 1994 decided to make C compatible with character encoding that is already over 20 years old and long obsolete. Way to go!

I suspect it was less EBCDIC and more non-English types where punctuation can be surprisingly absent.