On: Interviewing programmers: coding test example explained

[cperciva]

Huh, you're right. I wonder when they changed that.

[nuxi → cperciva]

They didn't, it's there from at least ANSI C89 (ISO C90): "A byte with all bits set to 0, called the null character, shall exist in the basic execution character set; it is used to terminate a character string literal."

[JoachimSchipper → nuxi]

I think the rationale is in EBCDIC support; the C standard didn't want to/couldn't mandate ASCII, and therefore could not use the ASCII NUL character.

I honestly don't know whether POSIX/SUS mandates ASCII.

[nuxi → JoachimSchipper]

As far as I understand, no: http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/xrat/xbd_chap0...

[JoachimSchipper → nuxi]

I read that as "ASCII must be supported, do whatever else you want". But I don't want to spend too much time on this...

[jonsen → cperciva]

NUL is in ASCII an abbreviation for null.