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What is the reason for Unicode escapes? It is something legacy from when Unicode was not universally accepted in all systems? Do other programming languages hav

• chrisseaton 8y ago
  Several programming languages have arcane ways to write what today seem like very normal characters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraphs_and_trigraphs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraphs_and_trigraphs For example C has escape sequences for characters as basic as # and [.
  • zapzupnz 8y ago
    Doesn't it have escape sequences for those because they're used in the language's syntax? Stands to reason, or is this even in string literals?
    • klodolph 8y ago
      They are alternative ways of writing the same character, unlike escape sequences, which have a different meaning from the unescaped version of the same character. For example, in C, I can write: int a<:10:>; Or I can write: int a[10]; They are the same, because <: is exactly the same as [, and :> is exactly the same as ] (except… mercifully, digraphs are not interpreted in strings; trigraphs are another story). However, in a string, the escape sequence \" means something different from ". One is a character in the string, the other ends the string. Digraphs and trigraphs exist because not all keyboards have the corresponding characters, like [ and ]. For example, look at a Swedish keyboard. (You can type [ and ], but not as easily, and maybe not at all on some older keyboards.)