[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #57879] strncmp(str_a, str_b, N) gives an error for N=0

[Rik]

Follow-up Comment #4, bug #57879 (project octave):

The use of N < 0 most likely indicates a situation the programmer did not
anticipate and I believe Octave should produce an error for this case,
regardless of what Matlab does.  In general, Octave validates its inputs more
carefully than Matlab in order to prevent garbage in / garbage out
calculations.

I feel the same way about N = 0, but there is a better argument to be made
there because zero length, i.e., empty strings are real whereas strings with
negative length do not exist.

Note that the C library function uses size_t for N which is an unsigned data
type.  That suggests requiring N to be in the range [0, MAX_INT] during input
validation.  Otherwise, -1 will be mapped to MAX_INT-1 which will not do the
right thing at all.

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