the preprocessor can reliably determine the signedness of wchar_t.
L'\0' is used for 0 in the expressions so that, if the underlying type
of wchar_t is long rather than int, the promoted type of the
expression will match the type of wchar_t.
the historical mess of having different definitions for C and C++
comes from the historical C definition as (void *)0 and the fact that
(void *)0 can't be used in C++ because it does not convert to other
pointer types implicitly. however, using plain 0 in C++ exposed bugs
in C++ programs that call variadic functions with NULL as an argument
and (wrongly; this is UB) expect it to arrive as a null pointer. on
64-bit machines, the high bits end up containing junk. glibc dodges
the issue by using a GCC extension __null to define NULL; this is
observably non-conforming because a conforming application could
observe the definition of NULL via stringizing and see that it is
neither an integer constant expression with value zero nor such an
expression cast to void.
switching to 0L eliminates the issue and provides compatibility with
broken applications, since on all musl targets, long and pointers have
the same size, representation, and argument-passing convention. we
could maintain separate C and C++ definitions of NULL (i.e. just use
0L on C++ and use (void *)0 on C) but after careful analysis, it seems
extremely difficult for a C program to even determine whether NULL has
integer or pointer type, much less depend in subtle, unintentional
ways, on whether it does. C89 seems to have no way to make the
distinction. on C99, the fact that (int)(void *)0 is not an integer
constant expression, along with subtle VLA/sizeof semantics, can be
used to make the distinction, but many compilers are non-conforming
and give the wrong result to this test anyway. on C11, _Generic can
trivially make the distinction, but it seems unlikely that code
targetting C11 would be so backwards in caring which definition of
NULL an implementation uses.
as such, the simplest path of using the same definition for NULL in
both C and C++ was chosen. the #undef directive was also removed so
that the compiler can catch and give a warning or error on
redefinition if buggy programs have defined their own versions of
NULL prior to inclusion of standard headers.
the old behavior of exposing nothing except plain ISO C can be
obtained by defining __STRICT_ANSI__ or using a compiler option (such
as -std=c99) that predefines it. the new default featureset is POSIX
with XSI plus _BSD_SOURCE. any explicit feature test macros will
inhibit the default.
installation docs have also been updated to reflect this change.
to deal with the fact that the public headers may be used with pre-c99
compilers, __restrict is used in place of restrict, and defined
appropriately for any supported compiler. we also avoid the form
[restrict] since older versions of gcc rejected it due to a bug in the
original c99 standard, and instead use the form *restrict.
really wchar_t should never vary, but the ARM EABI defines it as an
unsigned 32-bit int instead of a signed one, and gcc follows this
nonsense. thus, to give a conformant environment, we have to follow
(otherwise L""[0] and L'\0' would be 0U rather than 0, but the
application would be unaware due to a mismatched definition for
WCHAR_MIN and WCHAR_MAX, and Bad Things could happen with respect to
signed/unsigned comparisons, promotions, etc.).
fortunately no rules are imposed by the C standard on the relationship
between wchar_t and wint_t, and WEOF has type wint_t, so we can still
make wint_t always-signed and use -1 for WEOF.
not heavily tested, but it seems to be correct, including the odd
behavior that seeking is in terms of wide character count. this
precludes any simple buffering, so we just make the stream unbuffered.
Rich Felker