make nil string behave like empty string

[krux02]

No description provided.

[dom96]

Wow. This sure is a wide reaching change.

I'm pretty sure this will cause a lot of breakage.

[krux02]

Well yes it does, but it is a wanted change in the language as I discussed it often with Araq in the irc chat. (sorry again for no link, but you can ask if you have doubt). There is one thing that causes problems though, and that is the '\0' termination of strings. At the moment all strings have an extra byte for the '\0' terminator. And some code relies on the fact that when there is a string, there will always be an extra '\0' character at the end. The empty string breaks this.

var s: string  # is should now behave like an empty string
echo s[0]      # on an empty '\0' terminated string this should be '\0', 
               # but here it reads the nil pointer and crashes.

I don't think that a nil check on the index operator is feasible.

[krux02]

I don't have any knowledge about the javascript, nor the javascript backend, so I would need help for that part. Even better if someone would take that part over.

[Araq]

Even better if someone would take that part over.

Only compiler frontend issues are affected, the JS backend knows about it already.

[Araq]

merged manually.

[krux02]

wow, that was a tough one I guess.