Silly newbie question - Carrot character (^)

[Roy Smith]

In article <87fwve53ve.fsf at xemacs.org>,
 Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic at xemacs.org> wrote:

> It's not a matter of quality, but of intended audience.  To most
> ordinary programmers the standards documents such as the C standard, the
> C++ standard, or the Python reference are quite dense and hard to use as
> a reference, and yet they are considered quite well done.

Not only is the C++ reference obtuse and dense, it's also not commonly 
available.  It is copyright by ISO and only available for a fee.  I own 
a copy, but I'd venture to say that the vast majority of C++ programmers 
out there have never seen one.

Heck, if was a programmer and wanted to spend money today to buy a copy, 
I wouldn't even know where to go to order one.  I googled for "iso c++ 
standard" and found http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/, which 
includes a well-hidden link to 
http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/standards, which says, 
"Published ISO and IEC standards can be purchased from a member body of 
ISO or IEC".  How one would go about figuring out who such member body 
is, I have no idea.  Any self-respecting C++ programmer would have given 
up the scavenger hunt by now.  Just kept throwing typecasts at your code 
until it compiles, and move on.

Python may not have a reference manual which is up to the quality of the 
C++ manual, but what's there is freely available on docs.python.org.

As for the subject of this thread, you might want to check out 
http://archive.midrange.com/midrange-l/200703/msg00036.html.