Re: Alternative approach to the git config NULL value checking patches..

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Feb 10, 2008, 23:36 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.1.00.0802101532070.2920@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vbq6oe98y.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Sun, 10 Feb 2008, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> >
> > And this is different from checking against NULL exactly how?
> 
> Exactly.  My answer to your question is: "It is not different
> from checking against NULL at all."

Of course it is.

Not using NULL means that things like

	strcmp()
	atoi()
	..

all work and automatically get the right answer and don't need to care.

Take a look at the NULL-compare patches. 90% of them are just noise.

Yes, the 10% that actually *cares* will look exactly the same (the difference being comparing against NULL or config_true), but all the stuff that compares against a special string can just ignore the fact that the special truth value will never ever match that string.

		Linus