Re: [Pan-users] article-cache v 0.139

[Duncan]

Rhialto posted on Mon, 01 Oct 2012 18:34:51 +0200 as excerpted:

> On Mon 01 Oct 2012 at 11:43:08 +0000, Duncan wrote:
>> But usenetbucket's devs apparently didn't read past "null", and took it
>> to be "null-as-in-byte-0x00".
> 
>> I've often wondered just how often that ambiguity causes issues.  Here
>> we have a case in point!
> 
> Another issue that seems to confuse many people is that the character
> with value 0 is called NUL, with one L, and not NULL, or null, or
> anything else with 2 ls. All control characters 0-31 have 3 character
> uppercase names. So if the RFC says "null", that also means it can't be
> "NUL".

I've seen that point made before, but I've never checked it, and don't 
remember seeing it in the intro programming (pascal) classes I did have.

Without that research it does ring a bit hollow, tho.  As in, all the 
other three-letter control-characters in ASCII, many of which made a 
great deal of sense back in the telegraph-style physical printer control 
output days, but not so much now.  With certain exceptions (line-end 
chars, which can actually differ, tabs, nul(l), in some contexts ctrl-C, 
not so many others), they're generally simply data-stream characters now, 
like any other, or at least like any other out of the normal printing 
range.

So here, I always thought NUL was much like SOH, ETX, EOT, ACK, BEL, 
NAK...

In fact, take a look at this ASCII table, which lists those same as 
(null), (start of heading), (end of text), (end of transmission), 
(acknowledge), (bell), (negative acknowledge)...

http://www.asciitable.com/

IOW, at least according to /that/ table, NUL is INDEED a standard 3-
letter short form for "null", just as SOH is the standard 3-letter short 
form of "start of heading".

But of course not everything found on the net is true, and I've never 
actually cared enough about it to spend any dedicated time actually 
researching it, so you may well be correct and my general feeling as well 
as that table may be wrong.

But either way, as I said, I've seen that argument made before, so 
correct or misconception, it has a reasonable following who believe it to 
be true.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman