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From: PLS@cup.portal.com (Paul L Schauble)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: String lengths
Message-ID: <14331@cup.portal.com>
Date: 5 Feb 89 06:25:30 GMT
References: <6133@columbia.edu> <5124@aldebaran.UUCP> <7@microsoft.UUCP> <213@nbires.nbi.com> <38@microsoft.UUCP> <219@nbires.nbi.com>
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Organization: The Portal System (TM)
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This deserves a new subject.

Since it was mentioned in the Endian Wars, does anyone know why C uses the
null terminated string rather than an explicit length? It seems like such
an odd choice considering that
  - It removes a character from the character set, a source of many C
    bugs, and
  - All machines I know of that have character string instructions want
    the length of the string. This forces the string primitives to first
    scan for null, a time wasting operation.

There must have been a reason. What is it?

  ++PLS