• Mike Wynn (61/61) Oct 01 2002 Three related things,

"Mike Wynn" <mike.wynn l8night.co.uk> writes:

Three related things,

why are zero length arrays null, why does 'null' ~ array work and why does
Stream.readLine() return null on a zero length source string.

I personally would like Stream.readline() to return a null ONLY at eof, if
the source line is '\n' then I would prefer a zero length array returned.

I tried to change the phobos src so that after the first
   char c = getc();
I added
   result = new char[0];
but still get 'null' returned

I also noticed that there was
     default:
      result ~= c;

but result is never assigned is this realy a safe operation, surely this
should throw an exception

I then tried this test prog ...
import c.stdio;
import stream;

void printValue( char[] str )
{
 if ( str == null ){
  printf( "array is null;\n" );
 } else {
  printf( "array is %i chars long;\n", str.length );
 }
}


int main( char[][] args )
{
 char [] ar;
 try {
  printf( "undef ... " );
  printValue( ar );
  printf( "new char[0] ... " );
  ar = new char[0];
  printValue( ar );
  printf( "new char[1] ... " );
  ar = new char[1];
  printValue( ar );
 } catch (Exception e ) {
  printf("Exception caught:\n");
  e.print();
 }
 return 0;
}

and got the output
undef ... array is null;
new char[0] ... array is null;
new char[1] ... array is 1 chars long;

to me this is very bad,  new char[0] should return a zero length non null
array
it may be my time working with Java but having zero length non null arrays
are very useful,
for instance when reading from a stream a 0 length line is exactly that and
a null is eof or no line.

I can see that you may want to do the following
char[] str = getStr();
if ( str.length > 0 ) { ... }
and have 'null'.length return 0 (as it does), to save the check

if ( (str!=null) && (str.length > 0) ) { ... }

but still feel that `new type[0]` != null

Mike.