Re: unnecessary assertions in g_strsplit and g_strjoinv

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Owen Taylor wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 2004-02-24 at 09:48, Bill Haneman wrote:
> > g_strsplit and g_strjoinv now contain assertions that the string to split or strings to join are non-NULL.
> >
> > It's not clear to me that this is necessary; surely glib should check for NULL, but the semantics
> > of splitting a NULL string needn't be ambiguous.   As it stands now, glib does the assertion
> > checks, but requiring the client to do so means that all clients must test 'string' and
> > 'str_array', before calling g_strsplit and strjoinv, respectively.
> >
> > Removing the assertions would reduce code size since all the glib string routine clients in the
> > desktop could omit the checks (as some already do :-P ).
> >
> > I think this makes sense - note also that the requirement for the args of g_strsplit and g_strjoinv to
> > be non-NULL is not documented.
> 
> No GLib string functions accept NULL, these functions certainly weren't
> meant to be any different. What would it mean? NULL is not, never, the
> same as "".
> 
> If people were commonly calling these functions with NULL and that had
> some "reasonable" behavior, then we might have to preserve that for
> compatibility. But it would be very much something forced by a past
> screwup, not the way we would do it normally.

There's a lot of code that's now spewing glib warnings about this
now, whereas there were no warnings previously (asserts were added
in 2.3+ I think).  Behavior has not changed otherwise.  So I believe
that your condition (above) is actually the current situation.

- Bill


> Regards,
>                                                 Owen

-- 
------
Bill Haneman 
Gnome Accessibility Project
Sun Microsystems Ireland