Digraphs and trigraphs

In computer programming, digraphs and trigraphs are sequences of two and three characters, respectively, that appear in source code and, according to a programming language's specification, should be treated as if they were single characters.

Various reasons exist for using digraphs and trigraphs: keyboards may not have keys to cover the entire character set of the language, input of special characters may be difficult, text editors may reserve some characters for special use and so on. Trigraphs might also be used for some EBCDIC code pages that lack characters such as { and }.

The basic character set of the C programming language is a subset of the ASCII character set that includes nine characters which lie outside the ISO 646 invariant character set. The ANSI C committee invented trigraphs as a way of entering source code using keyboards that support any version of the ISO 646 character set.

Trigraphs are not commonly encountered outside compiler test suites. Some compilers support an option to turn recognition of trigraphs off, or disable trigraphs by default and require an option to turn them on. Some can issue warnings when they encounter trigraphs in source files. Borland supplied a separate program, the trigraph preprocessor, to be used only when trigraph processing is desired (the rationale was to maximise speed of compilation).

Different systems define different sets of digraphs and trigraphs, as described below.

Early versions of ALGOL predated the standardised ASCII and EBCDIC character sets, and were typically implemented using a manufacturer-specific six-bit character code. A number of ALGOL operations either lacked codepoints in the available character set or were not supported by peripherals, leading to a number of substitutions including := for ← (assignment) and >= for ≥ (greater than or equal).

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