[gpderetta]

The Committee recently got rid of trigraphs (required for EBCDIC compatibility). IBM was strongly against the proposal but was finally outvoted. They do keep the functionality as a conforming extension in their compiler, but now that they have been removed from the standard, the language might evolve in ways that might make the extension non-conforming.

[WalterBright]

Trigraphs can be supported with the simple expedient of putting a filter in front of the compiler that converts the trigraph sequences to the corresponding character. It doesn't have to be in the compiler itself.

In fact, trigraphs were designed to operate this way.

That is, until the addition of raw string literals broke that.