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by pjc50 3066 days ago
> why does C++ still support

Stop right there! There is plenty of evidence that removing features from a language is fatal to adoption. Both Perl and Python have suffered from this.

Specifically for trigraphs (apart from these, EBCDIC support doesn't affect compilers on other systems) IBM have a vote and they voted not to remove it: https://isocpp.org/files/papers/N4210.pdf

2 comments

How has Python suffered from this? They broke things going from 2 to 3... and it was still the fastest growing language from 2017. It clearly wasn't popular just because they removed features, but you can't say that removing things is fatal to adoption.
IIRC they did lose the final vote though, and trigraphs is one of the few features ever removed from C++.
I miss them - I enjoyed being able to write ??=include at the top of my files.
Hey, digraphs are still there, they are almost as much fun as trigraph!