"David H. Gutteridge" <da...@gutteridge.ca> writes:

Thanks for the history and it is  all sensible.

> "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.

It may have been BSD style, but I think it's wrong to use lowercase for
an ASCII codepoint.  And therefore it is confusing to people who know
that the ASCII zero byte is written NUL.


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