On 24.04.2017 17:53, Eric Blake wrote: > 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.
Might, yes, but we have it all over the code. I'm not particularly avid to change this, because I am in fact one of the culprits (and I'm a non-native speaker, but I do like to use LaTeX so I know my \iff). (By the way, judging from the author's name of this line of code (which is Thiemo Seufer), I'd wager he's not a native speaker either.) >>> * 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. Furthermore, this doesn't have anything to do with being a native speaker or not: NUL is just the commonly used and probably standardized abbreviation of a certain ASCII character (in any language). It's OK not to know this, but I don't think it's OK to change the comment. Max
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