Why Were Digraphs Introduced in C and C ?

The Purpose of Digraphs in C and C

Although digraphs may not be commonly used today, their existence in C99 and C can be attributed to the days when programmers faced difficulties with accessing the ISO 646 character set.

The ISO 646 character set, also known as the ASCII character set, includes symbols such as brackets and braces. However, many early computer systems and keyboards lacked support for these characters.

To address this challenge, C and C introduced digraphs as a way to represent these characters using sequences of two characters. For instance, the double colon (::) in the provided code snippet is a digraph that represents the backslash () character.

With digraphs, programmers could write code that was compatible with both systems that supported the ISO 646 character set and those that did not. Thus, digraphs provided a convenient solution for accommodating a wider range of systems with varying character set capabilities.

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