On Sat, Dec 14, 2002 at 12:22:14PM -0500, Matthew Hagerty wrote:
>> Sure, the MemMove() documentation is terrible -- but then there were so
>> many non-trivial functions to document, it's not surprising they didn't
>> spend much time on this one, which has an "obvious" standard counterpart.
>
> I disagree. Assumptions will make a fool of you every time.
I don't see what's led you to think I disagree with you. Perhaps you're
just making an assumption? :-)
> Palm is a commercial business for which you have to pay for access
> to the hardware and software, and being such I expect great documentation
> and superior support (from Palm.) After all, what are we paying for?
I dunno. Who told you you had to pay money to Palm to be a Palm OS
developer? What *are* you paying for?
> I'm sure there are plenty of people in the Palm community, I being one of
> them, who would gladly contribute to such things as better documentation,
I've always been disappointed by the quality of this particular piece
of documentation. Last time MemMove() came up here, I took the time to
point out this particular vagueness to PalmSource's documentation team
and showed them the text in the ISO C Standard for comparison. The
response was "thanks, I'll take care of it". Who knows, it may already
have been fixed -- albeit without anyone outside PalmSource benefiting
until the next edition of the documentation.
It seemed like a way to contribute to better documentation to me.
> Moving and copying are not the same. I don't see what is so obvious.
Palm OS has, for example, a bunch of functions called MemCmp, MemMove,
MemSet, StrCat, StrChr, StrCompare, StrCopy, StrLen, StrNCompare,
StrNCopy. These do more or less kind of something approximately similar
to the Standard C functions memcmp, memmove, memset, strcat, strchr,
strcmp, strcpy, strlen, strncmp, strncpy, respectively. If the basic
pattern here is not obvious to you, I fear that you will not enjoy being
a programmer very much :-).
(To be sure, the "kind of approximately similar" thing is a problem --
for example, as of 4.0 StrNCompare() has very little similarity with
strncmp(). But that's a different question from the obviousness
question at hand.)
> why didn't they just use the man page entry for memmove(), since it
> is clear and concise, would have been faster (cut and paste), and tells
> you that you are making a *copy*.
Gee, maybe because that's someone else's copyrighted material?
Incidentally, I'm astonished that the FreeBSD man page for memmove(3)
uses the term _string_: _string_ in C specifically means "pointer to a
*NUL-terminated* array of characters", but NULs mean nothing to memmove().
> I'll step off my soapbox now. Thank you everyone for the information, and
> especially you John, for giving me a chance to have a good down-home
> argument! :-)
It takes two to have an argument. Alone, you're just ranting.
John
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