On Feb 13 18:05, Pedro Alves wrote:
> On 01/20/2015 04:35 PM, Doug Evans wrote:
> 
> > I for one would liked to have seen the data to back up
> > the claim that NUL-terminated is archaic.
> > It's not that I don't trust someone's judgement, rather it's that that's
> > the wrong way to impose the change.
> 
> I think saying NUL instead of "null" is as archaic as saying CR instead of
> "carriage return", LF instead of "line feed", NL instead of "new line",
> etc.  I mean, maybe archaicness is not really the issue.
> 
> IMO, it's just a matter of whether we think using the character's
> control code symbol is OK instead of the full name.  I think the
> decision should be based on that alone.
> 
> E.g., would we write:
> 
>  "If this section exists, its contents is a list of entries separated
>   by CR NL, specifying scripts to load.  The list is terminated with
>   a NUL character."

Sure, except for s/NL/LF/g.

What I don't grok here either is the usage of the word "archaic" in
terms of a well-known, well-established, documented, and, above all,
*standardised*(*) set of abreviations of characters with a certain
meaning.

NUL is the character with the value \0.  Why is that suddenly a problem?
Aren't developers the target group of the GDB documentation?  Isn't ASCII
developer 101?


Corinna

(*) https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc20
    https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf-announce/KIbuNLhChScLC2JBTmFOjj8fT78
    http://www.rfc-editor.org/std/std-index.txt

-- 
Corinna Vinschen
Cygwin Maintainer
Red Hat