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.
> 
>>  * 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.

-- 
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3266
Virtualization:  qemu.org | libvirt.org