Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!think!ames!sdcsvax!ucsdhub!jack!sdeggo!dave
From: dave@sdeggo.UUCP (David L. Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: C machine
Message-ID: <164@sdeggo.UUCP>
Date: 19 Dec 87 21:56:09 GMT
References: <261@ivory.SanDiego.NCR.COM>
Organization: Lazy Programmer's Society of San Diego
Lines: 20

In article <261@ivory.SanDiego.NCR.COM>, jan@ivory.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Jan Stubbs) writes:
> Personally, I can't imagine any convenience a null terminated string would 
> have over a string preceded by its length. 

Well, there is no limit imposed on the length of the string.  It also takes
up one less byte per string in overhead (unless you wanted to limit your
string length to 255 characters) which isn't very important today, but
probably was when C was first defined.

Besides, there's nothing that says you can't write a string package which
has the string preceeded by the length.  If this were still NULL-terminated,
it would still work with exsisting functions (by passing the actual beginning
of the string to them).


-- 
David L. Smith
{sdcsvax!man,ihnp4!jack!man, hp-sdd!crash, pyramid}!sdeggo!dave
man!sdeggo!dave@sdcsvax.ucsd.edu 
"rm -r / : A power toy is not a tool."