Re: unnecessary assertions in g_strsplit and g_strjoinv

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

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.

Regards,
						Owen