[swift-evolution] [Draft] Fix a typo in two String methods

[Félix Cloutier]

So I can see in hindsight that perhaps people meant "NUL-terminated string" the whole time, but "NUL-terminated string" has 19,700 results on Google, whereas "null-terminated string" has 192,000.

I have a funny anecdote to share. I got really upset on reddit one day <https://xkcd.com/386/> that someone said that some trojan was a "virus". That's not right! Trojans are not viruses! And then someone came along and asked, "what type of software would you use to remove a trojan?" And the answer to that, of course, is an anti-virus.

I can come up with a number of other instances where people use technically incorrect names that are just so powerfully ingrained that it's not even worth it to fight back. Like JPEG vs JFIF.

Point being, while I have lots of respect for standards, if what you want is consensus, siding with the 90% is a better idea.

Félix

> Le 23 juil. 2016 à 15:21:48, Andrew Trick via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> a écrit :
> 
>> 
>> On Jul 23, 2016, at 3:16 PM, Chris Lattner <clattner at apple.com> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> On Jul 23, 2016, at 2:38 PM, Andrew Trick via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> On Jul 23, 2016, at 2:06 PM, Xiaodi Wu via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> On Sat, Jul 23, 2016 at 3:54 PM, Daniel Duan <daniel at duan.org> wrote:
>>>> In the context of character sets, "nul" is the correct name for the 0 value. "null" only makes sense when we are talking about pointer-like references.
>>>> 
>>>> Oh, I see: "NUL-terminated" is a thing because "NUL" is the ASCII name. Still a little bizarre looking, though, especially if it's UTF8 rather than ASCII. I am less bothered by it now, thanks :)
>>> 
>>> Yeah. Using the ASCII abbreviation was intentional but after thinking about it for a second I still think it should be renamed. Swift methods are supposed to be spelled out in english. There’s no reason to use an abbreviation here.
>> 
>> “NUL” is an abbreviation for “Null Character”.  You think that it is a good idea to spell out its full two-word name?
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_character
> 
> I’ll take the troll bait. “nulTerminatedUTF8" should read “nullTerminatedUTF8” because
> 1. null-terminated is a common english phrase
> 2. the acronym is not recognizable lowercase and in the context of the above phrase
> 
> Andy
> 
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