On Wed, Apr 26, 2017 at 3:11 AM, Max Reitz <mre...@redhat.com> wrote: > 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. Thanks for your explanation. > > Max >
