I'm not convinced that NUL vs. C's "null character" is just a silly semantic argument. NUL is an ASCII abbreviation and the implementors probably wanted to avoi

I'm not convinced that NUL vs. C's "null character" is just a silly semantic argument. NUL is an ASCII abbreviation and the implementors probably wanted to avoid being tied to a particular character encoding - there is no mention of NUL in the C standard. As for the NULL, it needn't be a pointer value, the standard permits it being "an integral constant expression with the value 0", so in certain implementations it can be the same as '\0'.