On 06/15/2016 12:29 PM, Paul Eggert wrote: > sur-behoffski wrote: >> Are there documentation standards, especially GNU ones, that cover this >> distinction? If not, is it worth striving to gradually introduce this >> in a systematic manner, e.g. "NUL (the zero character)"? > > I don't know of any terminology standards in this area. (Wikipedia does > not count. :-)
The POSIX standard tries to consistently use NUL for the character name (whether you are using a unibyte encoding and it fits in char, or a wide encoding where it fits in wchar_t), a 'null byte' for a byte that is all zeroes (which happens to be the NUL character in both unibyte and in multibyte encodings, since no other multibyte character is allowed to have an embedded null byte), and a 'null pointer' when referring to a pointer to nowhere (the constant NULL is a null pointer, as is the C expression '((void*)0)', although the null pointer need not have an all-zero bit representation in hardware). http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap03.html in particular 3.243-3.245 -- Eric Blake eblake redhat com +1-919-301-3266 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org
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