On 2022-03-26 11:57, Roland Illig wrote:
The term "null-terminated string" is quite common when talking about C. In contrast, the word "nul" in "nul-terminated" always reminds me of the character abbreviation in ASCII, which has a narrower scope than C. I prefer to keep "null-terminated" here.
Hi all, While I don't really want to prolong this debate, as the committer who triggered this discussion, I felt I should respond, in part to explain why I made my choice (which I reverted, though I don't agree "null- terminated" is more correct). TL;DR: there is no consistency here in NetBSD's code base in man pages or comments in source code, and no applicable style guide I know of, but "NUL-terminated" is the most common form found. It seems there was also an attempt at standardization in man pages made in 2005-2006, settling on "nul-terminated". I was taught (several decades ago) that the short form for the null byte or null character was NUL in ANSI C parlance (not just ASCII), and that "null-terminated" was incorrect as it's ambiguous. If someone were to say "null-byte-terminated", "null-character-terminated", or for the other context "null-pointer-terminated", that would be fine. "NUL-terminated" was the unambiguous contraction. (As others have pointed out, a cleverer way to avoid this debate would be to use entirely different terms.) The most common form found in man pages at present installed in NetBSD -current is actually "NUL-terminated", by a significant margin. That's in part because many of those are from third-party projects, e.g., OpenBSD and OpenSSL, which standardized on that form. The next most common is "null-terminated", then (following slightly behind) "nul- terminated", then (much less commonly) "NULL-terminated" (which seems quite incorrect to me). I didn't look as closely at comments, but a similar pattern emerged, with "NUL-terminated" the most common under /usr/include, for example (in part due to the origins of some upstream code). (It's not my intent here to quote or debate exact statistics, so I haven't provided any. I'm sharing my perception of practice, rightly or wrongly.) "nul-terminated" and "null-terminated" seemed more common in man pages that originated from historical BSD sources, so, lacking any style guide, I inferred the lowercase "nul" was more "correct" as "BSD style" (excepting modern OpenBSD), even though that looks a bit odd to me. I then examined where "nul-terminated" came from, and found these bulk commits, which imply a standard. date: 2005-01-02 18:38:04 +0000; author: wiz; Mark up NULL, and replace null by nul where appropriate. date: 2006-10-16 08:48:45 +0000; author: wiz; nul/null/NULL cleanup: when talking about characters/bytes, use "nul" and "nul-terminate" when talking about pointers, use "null pointer" or ".Dv NULL" So that seemed to me the established style. Regards, Dave
