> Some rules have their basis in psychological findings, i.e. how developers read the source. Such issues are not important in machine generated code (because such code is never read by humans).<p>I wish. Sometimes code generators are also bug generators.
> Software developers working in countries whose keyboards do not offer all of the characters required to write C programs will require special equipment, or to break this rule.<p>I've never seen C code actually using trigraphs. The way I heard it, is that different charactersets in the 70s didn't contain all characters for C. This was not a problem in 2012 and not even in 2002 or even 1992 I think.
> Rule 6: This rule excludes the use of an EBCDIC character set. No use of IBM 370's in embedded systems.<p>Yeah... um... I wasn't really intending to use a 370 anyway, but thanks for pointing it out.