Re: [PATCH] Add support for embedding scripts in .debug_gdb_scripts.

[Stan Shebs <stanshebs@earthlink.net>]

On 1/20/15 8:35 AM, 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.

Reminiscent of my Wikipedia editing days!  It's pretty difficult to
prove obsolescence of a particular usage; Wikipedia editors trying to
decide the "most common" form of a term would resort to elaborate
combinations of Google searches, and then get mired down in meta-debate
about whether the searches were returning valid numbers - or whether 55%
for A and 45% for B was a meaningful difference.

My instant reaction is that "NUL-terminated" is an old-fashioned usage,
but I can't say exactly when it declined.  To some extent all the
control codes became more obscure due to the shift from terminals to
window systems, and I imagine the increasing use of char encodings
beyond original ASCII has had an effect as well.

In general, I would like to have the documentation maintainer be more of
an editor, to have more of a free hand in deciding style rules, and to
not insist that everything has to be written down beforehand.  The flip
side of the expectation is that we do need patches that make the
documents follow the rules reliably, so future contributors are not misled.

Stan