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From: cuuee@warwick.ac.uk (Sean Legassick)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: NULL as a string terminator
Message-ID: <1990Aug24.153158.12020@warwick.ac.uk>
Date: 24 Aug 90 15:31:58 GMT
References: <24141@megaron.cs.arizona.edu> <134@blekko.UUCP> <1990Aug20.000227.12867@icc.com>
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Organization: Computing Services, University of Warwick, UK
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In article <1990Aug20.000227.12867@icc.com> cbp@icc.com (Chris Preston) writes:
[quoting a quote]
>>*You* like your non-standard name for '\0', but no one else will
>>know what it means, and it's unlikely that it will ever be a Big Win
>>for you (like if we start terminating strings with ^A or something).
>
>  Then, it will be a very big win.  Using two characters would break
>  much more software than would changing the terminator to a single
>  different letter.  In the case of doing a sprinkling of assembly
>  on DOS or CPM, the $ is used as a terminator (typically) when calling an
>  interrupt service routine.  If you are doing assembly calls in a section
>  of code you need only
>  
[code omitted]
>
>  Typically, one could even replace '$' and '\0' further with
>  DOS_CPM_TERMINATOR and UNIX_DOS_C_CALL_TERMINATOR.  So, while you as
>  a Unix or Dos or whatever programmer might not care about the others, it
>  allows a level of abstraction that facilitates portability and
>  maintainability.
>
>
>  Mind you, I might like shorter labels, but one get's the idea.
>
	Very clever, but it hardly solves the problem of different string
representations - consider Pascal. It has not terminator, strings start with
a count. No amount of #defining will solve that.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sean Legassick,       cuuee@uk.ac.warwick.cu	"Man, I'm so hip I find it
  Computing Services	  (the walking 	           difficult to see over
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