On 04/24/2017 10:47 AM, Eric Blake wrote: > On 04/24/2017 10:37 AM, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote: > >>>> /* >>>> - * Returns true iff the first sector pointed to by 'buf' contains at >>>> least >>>> - * a non-NUL byte. >>>> + * Returns true if the first sector pointed to by 'buf' contains at >>>> least >>>> + * a non-NULL byte. >>> >>> NACK to both changes. 'iff' is an English word that is shorthand for >>> "if and only if". "NUL" means the one-byte character, while "NULL" >>> means the 8-byte (or 4-byte, on 32-bit platform) pointer value. >> >> I agree with Lidong shorthands are not obvious from non-native speaker. >> >> What about this? >> >> * Returns true if (and only if) the first sector pointed to by 'buf' >> contains > > That might be okay. > >> * at least a non-null character. > > But that still doesn't make sense. The character name is NUL, and > non-NULL refers to something that is a pointer, not a character.
What's more, the NUL character can actually occupy more than one byte (think UTF-16, where it is the two-byte 0 value). Referring to NUL byte rather than NUL character (or even the 'zero byte') makes it obvious that this function is NOT encoding-sensitive, and doesn't start mis-behaving just because the data picks a multi-byte character encoding. -- Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer Red Hat, Inc. +1-919-301-3266 Virtualization: qemu.org | libvirt.org
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
