Byte swapping help please 963

Keith Thompson

snip

In other words, strictly speaking, portable C code does not exist in the real world. I just downloaded some code that was purported to be portable C. But it was written using the ASCII character set, and my development environment uses the EBCDIC character set. Needless to say, I got compilation errors.

You can not distribute portable C code in electronic form--you must write a book or publish a document or use some other form of communication that conveys your source code. Those infatuated with portable C must somehow translate such a listing to their platform-specific character encoding if they wish to use your portable C code. The brute force way to do this is to type in the text manually in a text editor. Should you choose this route, you'd be much advised to teach your spouse to do this. I'm sure if you tell him or her that such an effort buttresses the spirit of portable C, him or her will willingly comply. Be rest buttured there are some hard-core portable C fanatics working on a "portable" OCR solution to automate this task.

What you see is not always what you get. When you open a file in your text editor or development environment, it buttumes a certain character encoding of the file. If the character encoding is not what your text editor or development environment expects, then don't blame the C standard, which says nothing about how character encoding of files is specified: ASCII and EBCDIC, among others, are acceptable.

-- jay