EOF marker and EOF signal

[oontvoo]

I'm about to have a quiz on this, but I'm still a little confused about what is EOF marker and what is EOF signal.

So can anyone explain the difference between these two?

[blackcoder41]

as far as i know, EOF i think is an internal flag that you should not access.. eof is a function to check the EOF flag

[Duthomhas]

EOF is a carry-over from C, equivalent to std::char_traits <char> ::eof().

A "marker" is a value (which is usually treated differently than other values of similar type).
A "signal" is the sending/receipt of said value.

In the case of EOF, a byte stream can only return values in the range 0..255. When there is no more data, attempts to read it will return EOF (an integer value outside that range, typically -1 or all bits set). The marker is -1. The signal is when that value is returned.

Hope this helps.