This is an unofficial snapshot of the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC22 WG21 Core Issues List revision 115d. See http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/ for the official list.

2024-10-26

1796. Is all-bits-zero for null characters a meaningful requirement?

[Moved to DR at the November, 2014 meeting.]

According to 5.3 [lex.charset] paragraph 3,

The basic execution character set and the basic execution wide-character set shall each contain all the members of the basic source character set, plus control characters representing alert, backspace, and carriage return, plus a null character (respectively, null wide character), whose representation has all zero bits.

It is not clear that a portable program can examine the bits of the representation; instead, it would appear to be limited to examining the bits of the numbers corresponding to the value representation (6.8.2 [basic.fundamental] paragraph 1). It might be more appropriate to require that the null character value compare equal to 0 or '\0' rather than specifying the bit pattern of the representation.

There is a similar issue for the definition of shift, bitwise and, and bitwise or operators: are those specifications constraints on the bit pattern of the representation or on the values resulting from the interpretation of those patterns as numbers?

Proposed resolution (February, 2014):

Change 5.3 [lex.charset] paragraph 3 as follows:

The basic execution character set and the basic execution wide-character set shall each contain all the members of the basic source character set, plus control characters representing alert, backspace, and carriage return, plus a null character (respectively, null wide character), whose representation has all zero bits value is 0. For each basic execution character set...