Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: strings
Message-ID: <1989May11.155935.22324@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <2846@tank.uchicago.edu> <5785@cbnews.ATT.COM> <10087@smoke.BRL.MIL> <1415@uw-entropy.ms.washington.edu> <17333@mimsy.UUCP> <10228@socslgw.csl.sony.JUNET> <10237@smoke.BRL.MIL> <10235@socslgw.csl.sony.JUNET>
Date: Thu, 11 May 89 15:59:35 GMT

In article <10235@socslgw.csl.sony.JUNET> diamond@csl.sony.junet (Norman Diamond) writes:
>Yeah, I think so.  Strings, for example.  Cobol, PL/I, Algol,
>Fortran-77, Snobol, etc., have string types and say what kind of
>operations can be done on strings.  C says that a string is terminated
>with a '\0' byte.  Instead of assigning a null string to a target,
>C programmers assign a '\0' byte, so the implementation of C library
>routines can never be speeded up.  For other languages, improvements
>are often made to implementations.

Improvements to C library routines are quite possible.  Like all such,
cleverness is sometimes required.  One convention is not intrinsically
worse than the other.
-- 
Mars in 1980s:  USSR, 2 tries, |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
2 failures; USA, 0 tries.      | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu