Hello Jonny, > However "nonempty" is not an English, or American English expression > we would ever use. Even "non-empty" isn't English, we'd say "not > empty", although in this sentence there is no need to have this at > all.... > Maybe in another 50 years "nonempty" will be a word, > but for now it isn't, so the hyphen is needed. Same as "non-NULL" But "nonempty" has been a word for a long, long time. As in "nonempty set", a term you'd use in maths any day. "non-empty" (with a hyphen) occurs dozens of times in the POSIX standard, just to take an example close to home. Now, one may argue the point about the hyphen, but re "non" vs "non-" see, for example, https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/HyphensEnDashesEmDashes/faq0079.html Opinions obviously differ, but the tendency in English is that thyphens are going away in these cases. I think CMoS has got it right. Things like "non-NULL" are exceptional, and it's because "NULL" is a keyword in C. Now, as to whether that word "nonempty" is even needed in that sentence, I am not sure. Presumably the point isto contrast with the "(NULL,0)" tuple mentioned in the preceding sentence. In that sense, it's possibly a helpful word, though I'm not sure it's necessary. Thanks, Michael -- Michael Kerrisk Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/
