Request for comment: Character substring lengths

[Tobias Schlüter]

FX Coudert wrote:
>>   if (substring)
>>     primary->ts.cl = NULL;
>>
>> Besides all the cause crashes this causes if one access ts.cl->length
>> without checking ts.cl, this also disables a lot of checks.
 >
 > I think there might be lots of places in the front-end relying on this
 > convention. A grep for "ts.cl " reveals a few trivial ones, but I
 > think there might be more...

Indeed, I found about this recently when I prepared my last series of 
patches.  I think I wrote something about this in one of my patch 
submissions, but I couldn't find it, so I may only have it in my private 
notes.  I will check later today if I kept them, as I then believed to 
have understood the mechanism behind charlenghths.

- Tobi