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Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

Did you choose the legacy C trigraphs over || for aesthetic purposes?

No, I don't really write C. I was remarking on something I saw once and I wanted to share it because the original article mentions trigraphs.

Could you review my comment on HN? Please educate me if there is something I haven’t understood, rather than downvoting my question.

The grandparent post is specifically about trigraphs. Saying something about trigraphs was the end-in-itself, trigraphs were chosen to illustrate something about trigraphs. So your question made no sense. Hope that helps.

Maybe the confusion was the other way, more like "why is that funny/interesting?"

An attempt to answer that: In English, mixing ?! at the end of a question is a way of indicating bewilderment. Like "What was that?!"

My question was precisely about why the user like trigraphs over using just || on this case. It is a very clear question and makes all the sense.

I didn't downvote your comment but understand why it looks "wrong": it's like, in a thread on English oddities, you replied to someone bringing up the "buffalo buffalo buffalo" example with the question "why are you so fond of bovines"?

It has nothing to do with that. I could ask why he didn't choose a different homonymic ambiguity [1].

[1] https://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php...

The post shows a “favorite C trigraph” thing, not that they were going out of their way to use trigraphs in actual code or that you should. Using trigraphs is the whole premise so no, your question makes no sense in that context.

FWIW the ??!??! double trigraph as error processing is funny because of the meaning of ?! and various combinations of ? and !. It is funny and it has trigraphs. That’s the whole point.

My reading of the downvoted question was one of genuine curiosity of why the author chose that as a favorite trigraph, as in “why that one instead of another”, not as criticism of the choice of trigraph over something more conventional. I may be wrong of course, but it didn’t seem like a particularly malicious question to me and your rationale unfortunately doesn’t convince me otherwise. Not that it has to, this is all very subjective after all, but just offering up a counter opinion.

I gave the question a +1 because I, as previously stated, read it to be genuine curiosity. Maybe a smiley would’ve helped, I don’t know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> The post shows a “favorite C trigraph” thing, not that they were going out of their way to use trigraphs in actual code or that you should.

But I am free to be curious and ask the author why he choose it! We are not computers but human beings! There is no HN rule that says that I cannot be curious and asks a question that arised from a thread but it is not connected to that! [1].

[1] https://www.iflscience.com/charles-babbage-once-sent-the-mos...

> But I am free to be curious and ask the author why he choose it

They chose it because the discussion is about trigraphs. It is not a particularly surprising choice to talk about trigraphs in that context.

> There is no HN rule that says that I cannot be curious and asks a question that arised from a thread but it is not connected to that!

I did not write that you did not follow HN rules, just that your question was very strange in the context. I did not downvote you, but I understand why some people did. Your question was a bit passive agressive, even if you did not mean it.

I think the misunderstanding is a bit of missing context from the original comment. I read it as “one of my favorite trigraphs [that I have seen]”. Their comment didn’t make a claim to using said trigraph, just that they had seen it somewhere and thought it was interesting.

Your comments seem to suggest your reading was “one of my favorite trigraphs [to use is]”, which is understandable as a valid interpretation.

The whole of this chain of comments is a misunderstanding on the original comment’s ambiguity.

> So your question made no sense. Hope that helps.

I think that is uncharitable. The question ("Did you choose the legacy C trigraphs over || for aesthetic purposes?") makes perfect sense to me. I think context makes it reasonably clear that the answer is 'yes,' but that doesn't mean that the question doesn't make sense, only perhaps that it didn't need to be asked.

Easiest way to get downvotes is to ask people not to give them. You just gotta ignore the haters.

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