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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: Re: C and C++, promotion, stabilization, migration (was: Re: New VSI
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Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2024 23:33:46 -0000 (UTC)
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On Mon, 19 Aug 2024 16:05:59 -0400, Stephen Hoffman wrote:

> strings and character encoding are more "fun":

If a system/library call is going to return a dynamic amount of data, it 
is good if it can give some indication of how much data it is going to 
return first.

The best calls are the ones that, if you pass NULL for the buffer, they 
will return the number of bytes they would have put in the buffer. So you 
allocate that size of buffer and do a second call, and get back the actual 
buffer data.

I did a Python wrapper for Fribidi, and unfortunately its text-encoding 
conversion calls didn’t work that way. But then, they probably 
couldn’t ...