Odd Looking declarations: char a??(3??)

[OzmoOzmo]

Any idea what this syntax is?

Porting some CPP code from VS2005 - will not compile in VS2010

Thought at first it was corrupted files - but files appear to be ok.

Syntax appears a lot in function variable declaration as well as within structs.

Seems be be an array - but would there be any reason the previous programmer would have used this "name??(n??)" syntax over just "name[n]" (that also appears in the code)?

Sample code below.

Thanks very much.

	char		szlast[2] = {0};
	char		previous_forward??(27??) = {0};
	char		previous_nm??(13??) = {0};	
	char		temp_pnt_str[21] = {0};

[Peter87]

They are called trigraphs.
http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/operator_alternative#Digraphs_and_trigraphs

I don't why they were used. Maybe the programmer who wrote the code found it difficult to type [ and ] on his keyboard.

[ne555]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraphs_and_trigraphs#C


As for reason, obfuscation I suppose.

[OzmoOzmo]

Thats great thanks:) - was going to just replace with [] but worried I was missing a trick somewhere. Thanks for the links.

Hard to find syntax stuff like this (question marks, and other symbols) on google.

[LB]

Digraphs and trigraphs are planned to be removed (or disabled by default) in C++1z

http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2014/n3981.html