Re: null-terminated vs. nul-terminated (was: Re: CVS commit: src/lib/libc/gen)

[Taylor R Campbell <campbell+netbsd-source-changes-d%mumble.net@localhost>]

> Date: Sat, 26 Mar 2022 16:53:19 +0100
> From: Roland Illig <roland.illig%gmx.de@localhost>
> 
> 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.

I feel like I've usually seen it as NUL-terminated.  I thought it was
in /usr/share/misc/style but I must have been thinking of a different
style guide.

`NUL' is better than `null' or `NULL' here because it's not a null
pointer, unlike, e.g., the execve argv terminator.  Even if the string
isn't US-ASCII, what character encoding calls a nonzero byte `NUL'?

`NUL' is better than `zero' or `0' here because it's unambiguously the
all-bits-zero byte, not the US-ASCII encoding of `0' (i.e., decimal 48
or 0x30).

`C string' is ambiguous because there are also char arrays that
function as strings but which are not guaranteed to be NUL-terminated,
as strncpy is intended for.