Re: [PATCH] Add a birdview-on-the-source-code section to the user manual

From: Karl Hasselström <kha@treskal.com>
Date: May 8, 2007, 21:31 UTC
Message-ID: <20070508213158.GB3969@diana.vm.bytemark.co.uk>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0705082306100.4167@racer.site>

On 2007-05-08 23:07:04 +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> On Tue, 8 May 2007, Karl Hasselström wrote:
>
> > On 2007-05-08 17:10:47 +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> >
> > > +  char *`, but is actually expected to be a pointer to `unsigned
> > > +  char[20]`.  This variable will contain the big endian version of the
> > > +  40-character hex string representation of the SHA-1.
> >
> > Either it should be "unsigned char[40]" (or possibly 41 with a
> > terminating \0), or else you shouldn't be talking about
> > hexadecimal since it's just a 20-byte big-endian unsigned integer.
> > (A third possibility is that I'm totally confused.)
>
> It is 40 hex-character, but 20 _byte_. If you have any ideas how to
> formulate that better than I did...

I think this is less confusing:

  This variable will contain the 160-bit SHA-1.

It avoids talking of hex, since it's not really stored in hex format any more than any other binary number with a number of bits divisible by four. And it avoids saying big-endian, which is not relevant anyway since we don't use hashes as integers.

-- 
Karl Hasselström, kha@treskal.com
      www.treskal.com/kalle