Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 2/2] qemu-img: fix some spelling errors

[Max Reitz]

On 24.04.2017 17:53, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 04/24/2017 10:47 AM, Eric Blake wrote:
>> On 04/24/2017 10:37 AM, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
>>
>>>>>  /*
>>>>> - * Returns true iff the first sector pointed to by 'buf' contains at
>>>>> least
>>>>> - * a non-NUL byte.
>>>>> + * Returns true if the first sector pointed to by 'buf' contains at
>>>>> least
>>>>> + * a non-NULL byte.
>>>>
>>>> NACK to both changes.  'iff' is an English word that is shorthand for
>>>> "if and only if".  "NUL" means the one-byte character, while "NULL"
>>>> means the 8-byte (or 4-byte, on 32-bit platform) pointer value.
>>>
>>> I agree with Lidong shorthands are not obvious from non-native speaker.
>>>
>>> What about this?
>>>
>>>  * Returns true if (and only if) the first sector pointed to by 'buf'
>>> contains
>>
>> That might be okay.

Might, yes, but we have it all over the code. I'm not particularly avid
to change this, because I am in fact one of the culprits (and I'm a
non-native speaker, but I do like to use LaTeX so I know my \iff).

(By the way, judging from the author's name of this line of code (which
is Thiemo Seufer), I'd wager he's not a native speaker either.)

>>>  * at least a non-null character.
>>
>> But that still doesn't make sense.  The character name is NUL, and
>> non-NULL refers to something that is a pointer, not a character.
> 
> What's more, the NUL character can actually occupy more than one byte
> (think UTF-16, where it is the two-byte 0 value).  Referring to NUL byte
> rather than NUL character (or even the 'zero byte') makes it obvious
> that this function is NOT encoding-sensitive, and doesn't start
> mis-behaving just because the data picks a multi-byte character encoding.

Furthermore, this doesn't have anything to do with being a native
speaker or not: NUL is just the commonly used and probably standardized
abbreviation of a certain ASCII character (in any language). It's OK not
to know this, but I don't think it's OK to change the comment.

Max

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