Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!mcvax!jack
From: jack@cwi.nl (Jack Jansen)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Null-terminated C strings
Message-ID: <152@piring.cwi.nl>
Date: 23 Dec 87 20:34:07 GMT
References: <14116@think.UUCP> <2958@okstate.UUCP>
Organization: AMOEBA project, CWI, Amsterdam
Lines: 20

Even though I favour null-terminated strings myself there is a very
strong point against them:
Very little error checking is possible in the runtime system.
Look at the bug reports in comp.bugs.4bsd for instance: I would
guess that about 25% of the bug reports is about programs that silently
assume that no mail-address/line/whatever will ever be more than
NSTR characters. I know, the programmer can cater for this, but it
shouldn't be her business.

Moreover, the approach where the count is kept with the pointer
has another *big* advantage: it unifies strings with other variable
dimension arrays. Again, this is not a point that I feel very strong
about myself (I don't think I *ever* inverted a matrix), but 
it *is* rather stupid that you have to specify the dimensions of
a matrix in a call some routine while the compiler knows those
dimensions already....

-- 
	Jack Jansen, jack@cwi.nl (or jack@mcvax.uucp)
	The shell is my oyster.