Terminology concerning strings

[Roland Illig]

Roland Illig wrote:
> Roland Illig wrote:
> 
>> Hi all,
>>
>> in the last time I have programmed a bit with strings, and I have 
>> found four properties of them which need to be distinguished and which 
>> should be named consistently throughout the whole Midnight Commander.
>>
>> * the _size_ of a string (as well as for other objects) is the number of
>>   bytes that is allocated for it. For arrays, it is the number of
>>   entries of the array. For strings it is at least _length_ + 1.
> 
> 
> To clarify this item: I want to continue using '\0'-terminated strings, 
> and I also want to regard them as arrays. The second sentence above is a 
> bit misleading, so here's a second try.
> 
> * the _size_ of a string (which is regarded as an array of an arbitrary
>   character type) is the number of array elements that may be accessed.

And here is the reason _why_ I want to continue using '\0'-terminated 
strings in the next time. Most library functions expect their arguments 
to be '\0'-terminated multibyte strings, so we have to provide them a 
trailing '\0' anyway.

For internal processing, we could invent some new string datatypes that 
have an explicit length field. But as long as we don't have such a 
datatype, we should make work easy and stick to the old convention of 
'\0'-terminating our strings. That way, we don't have to pass an extra 
length argument around to every function that does string-processing.

All that might change in future, but it's not urgent.

Roland