On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 6:04 PM, Victor Stinner wrote:

"NUL" is an abbreviation used in tables when you don't have enough space to write the full name: "null character".

Yep, fair description.

Where do you want to mention this abbreviation?

Sorry, I meant worth mentioning on the list, not anywhere particular in the docs - the topic came up recently when an instance of NUL was incorrectly changed to read 'NULL' instead and it took me a moment to figure out why the same reasoning *didn't* apply in this case. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan@gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia

On 9/6/2011 11:11 AM, Tres Seaver wrote:

FWIW, the RFC 20 (the ASCII spec) really really defines 'NUL' as the *name* of the \0 character, not just an "abbreviation used in tables":

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc20#section-5.2

As I read the text, the 2 or 3 capital letter *symbols* are abbreviations of of the names. Looking back up, I see ''' 4. Legend 4.1 Control Characters NUL Null DLE Data Link Escape (CC) ... 4.2 Graphic Characters Column/Row Symbol Name 2/0 SP Space (Normally Non-Printing) 2/1 ! Exclamation Point ''' 'NUL' and 'SP' are *symbols* that have the names 'Null' and 'Space', just as the symbol '!' is named 'Exclamation Point'. They just happen to be digraphs and trigraphs composed of 2 or 3 characters. I am sure that the symbol SP does not appear in the docs. The symbol 'LF' (for LineFeed) probably does not either. We just call it 'newline' or 'newline character' as that is how we use it. -- Terry Jan Reedy

Am 06.09.2011 10:04, schrieb Victor Stinner:

Le 06/09/2011 02:25, Nick Coghlan a écrit :

...

On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 10:01 AM, victor.stinner wrote:

...

Fix also spelling of the null character.

While these cases are legitimately changed to 'null' (since they're lowercase descriptions of the character), I figure it's worth mentioning again that the ASCII name for '\0' actually *is* NUL (i.e. only one 'L'). Strange, but true [1].

Cheers, Nick.

[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/ASCII

"NUL" is an abbreviation used in tables when you don't have enough space to write the full name: "null character".

Where do you want to mention this abbreviation?

I vote to paint the bikeshed BLU. Georg (Seriously, how many more messages will this triviality spawn?)