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Comment by parasti | Hacker News Reader

Starting with "The C string library" made me instantly tune out. C has a standard library, which has some string-related functions. There is no "C string library".

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It is not only not mportant at all, but also not real concern

string.h

It's a header file not a library.

Define library. Surely a library is a collection of functions, not a collection of files, so you could have a single file library. I don't know at what size a collection of functions becomes a library, but I don't think anyone does.

Ultimately this file is supposed to be the one stop shop for all string related needs, so in what sense isn't that a library.

I think they mean it's part of the standard library, instead of being a separate library.

It's not a header file, it's just a header, strictly speaking: the standard explicitly allows it to not be an actual file, and indeed there are implementations that don't have standard headers available as actual on-disk files. And, also strictly speaking, it should be <string.h>. You know, if we're being pedantic.

My point isn't about that, though. My point is if you start a blog post with "The C string library", my confidence in your ability to discuss the topic is shot before I even finish reading the sentence.

And my point is that if you start nitpicking a perfectly understandable (if slightly imprecise) and widely-used terminology, you better not open yourself to the self-same criticism lest people would justifiably ignore your opinion.

After all, what C has is "the C library". It's what standard literally calls it (it doesn't even explicitly provide for existence of other kinds of libraries) but everyone calls it "the standard library". Is it correct? Arguably, no.

You're still falling back on "what the standard says". It's not a correctness question.

So you merely discard others' opinions merely on the fact of them using speech patterns that are not even incorrect, you just personally dislike them? Okay, that's fine, I guess, although you initially explicitly framed it as a correctness problem: "There is no "C string library".

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