On Tue, Mar 29, 2022, 5:40 AM Greg Troxel <g...@lexort.com> wrote: > > "David H. Gutteridge" <da...@gutteridge.ca> writes: > > Thanks for the history and it is all sensible. > > > "nul-terminated" and "null-terminated" seemed more common in man pages > > that originated from historical BSD sources, so, lacking any style > > guide, I inferred the lowercase "nul" was more "correct" as "BSD style" > > (excepting modern OpenBSD), even though that looks a bit odd to me. I > > then examined where "nul-terminated" came from, and found these bulk > > commits, which imply a standard. > > > date: 2005-01-02 18:38:04 +0000; author: wiz; > > Mark up NULL, and replace null by nul where appropriate. > > > > date: 2006-10-16 08:48:45 +0000; author: wiz; > > nul/null/NULL cleanup: > > when talking about characters/bytes, use "nul" and "nul-terminate" > > when talking about pointers, use "null pointer" or ".Dv NULL" > > > > So that seemed to me the established style. > > It may have been BSD style, but I think it's wrong to use lowercase for > an ASCII codepoint. And therefore it is confusing to people who know > that the ASCII zero byte is written NUL. >
FreeBSD has adopted the POSIX language (null terminated) because it mirrors the standard and the xopen folks have blanket permission to use it in open source man pages... Warner >
