[Cython] char* and NULL in log statements

[Dag Sverre Seljebotn]

Johannes Wienke wrote:
> Am 06/04/2008 11:59 PM schrieb Dag Sverre Seljebotn:
>> Johannes Wienke wrote:
>>> Am 06/04/2008 07:47 PM schrieb Stefan Behnel:
>>>> If you *really* want None, then you can use something like this:
>>>>
>>>>     cdef inline stringOrNone(char* value):
>>>>          if value is NULL: return None
>>>>          return value
>>> That's exactly what I'm doing now but that's error-prone as you have to
>>> do this manually and can forget it.
>>
>> (Sorry about telling you to reread, I can see that you commented on it 
>> already.)
>>
>> Well, in my mind, this is a reason for supporting Stefan in removing 
>> auto-coercion of char* to Python strings altogether (that is suggested 
>> once down in those unicode discussion threads, right Stefan?). Then 
>> you would get a nice compiler error when you forget it, and it won't 
>> be error-prone.
> 
> Now with the context of encoding issues I can see the point. Things you 
> don't have to think of to often as Java developer. ;) Removing the 
> conversion then would be a good idea. Compiler warnings are of course 
> the best bug prevention. On the other hand this really handy... Hard to 
> decide.

To further expand on this point (for the purposes on the ongoing 
month-long argument about char* behaviour on this mailing list): If you 
were doing the same thing in Java (i.e. interfacing with a C library), I 
can tell you that you *would* have to care about encoding issues :-) 
There's no way Java would have let you create a string without 
specifying the encoding somewhere.

-- 
Dag Sverre