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From: jefu@pawl22.pawl.rpi.edu (Jeffrey Putnam)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Null-terminated C strings
Message-ID: <178@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU>
Date: 22 Dec 87 11:41:46 GMT
References: <261@ivory.SanDiego.NCR.COM> <164@sdeggo.UUCP> <174@quick.COM> <14116@think.UUCP>
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In article <.....> people write: 
Lots of stuff about strings with null terminators and lengths and dope vectors
and....

There are a lot of ways to implement strings in various ways and their
benefits and costs. 

Granted that strings are necessary in a language, there are a number of
ways to implement them and there are serious tradeoffs in chosing any
particular implementation.  When making this choice, i think personally
that the simplest method should be chosen if possible.  The problems
with the dope vectors and embedded counts are that there is magic going on
behind the scenes somewhere and often the exact semantics becomes much
more difficult to describe.  I have used languages that used such methods
and found that on occasion odd and unexplained things would happen 
because things were not made explicit.  

Another point that has been made, and should be made again is that C
is powerful enough to construct the other methods where needed.

One of the virtues of C is that much is made explicit and as simple as
possible and there is very little behind-the-scenes magic.  The same
may be said for Unix (tm), and (perhaps more germainly to this
newsgroup) RISC machines.  I would like to urge designers of systems,
languages, and machines to adopt the same general ideas - little magic,
and as simple as possible.

jeff putnam (userft4z%rpitsmts@itsgw.rpi.edu, though this account is
about to die)