At 11:57 PM 5/29/98 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
Null-terminating the string would be a nice touch; it's not necessary,
since there's a length field, but it would probably reduce accidents,
and it also makes it convenient for tools such as "strings" to find.
Bill, I didn't mean to ignore your comment in my comment I just sent.
Obviously, I needed another cup of coffee this morning. How nice is it to
make it null-terminated?
With counted strings, someone has to go and terminate them anyway, and the
only place where a null-terminated string is specified in the whole draft
is in the regular expression subpacket (and I don't know why it's there).
When I put on my developer's hat, I look at it and think that I'd write to
code to look at the length of the subpacket, and if it's greater than 1,
then I have text. If the string is null-terminated, how do I handle the
bizarre case of a specified comment that is a null string? Do I treat it
the same as no specified string, or as a blank comment? There's an easy
answer (treat it as no comment), but the question goes away if we just use
the count.
Jon
-----
Jon Callas jon(_at_)pgp(_dot_)com
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