C alternative tokens

C alternative tokens refer to a set of alternative spellings of common operators in the C programming language. They are implemented as a group of macro constants in the C standard library in the iso646.h header. The tokens were created by Bjarne Stroustrup for the pre-standard C++ language and were added to the C standard in a 1995 amendment to the C90 standard via library to avoid the breakage of existing code.

The alternative tokens allow programmers to use C language bitwise and logical operators which could otherwise be hard to type on some international and non-QWERTY keyboards. The name of the header file they are implemented in refers to the ISO/IEC 646 standard, a 7-bit character set with a number of regional variations, some of which have accented characters in place of the punctuation marks used by C operators.

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