Why are there digraphs in C and C++?
Digraphs were created for programmers that didn’t have a keyboard which supported the ISO 646 character set. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_trigraph
digraphs
What is this smiley-with-beard expression: “”?
The program uses digraphs to represent the following: [] {}; This is a lambda expression that does nothing. The corresponding symbols have these equivalents: <: = [ %> = } Though they are generally unneeded today, digraphs are useful for when your keyboard lacks certain keys necessary to use C++’s basic source character set, namely … Read more
When were the ‘and’ and ‘or’ alternative tokens introduced in C++?
From the first ISO C++ standard C++98, this is described in 2.5/ Alternative tokens [lex.digraph]: Alternative token representations are provided for some operators and punctuators. In all respects of the language, each alternative token behaves the same, respectively, as its primary token, except for its spelling. The set of alternative tokens is defined in Table … Read more