Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!kddlab!titcca!sragwa!wsgw!socslgw!diamond!diamond
From: diamond@diamond.csl.sony.junet (Norman Diamond)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: strings
Message-ID: <10245@socslgw.csl.sony.JUNET>
Date: 12 May 89 09:43:06 GMT
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> <1989May11.155935.22324@utzoo.uucp>
Sender: news@csl.sony.JUNET
Reply-To: diamond@csl.sony.junet (Norman Diamond)
Organization: Sony Computer Science Laboratory Inc., Tokyo, Japan
Lines: 27

I wrote:

>>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.

In article <1989May11.155935.22324@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:

>Improvements to C library routines are quite possible.  Like all such,
>cleverness is sometimes required.  One convention is not intrinsically
>worse than the other.

How do you improve a C library routine to look in a string descriptor
to just grab the current length of the string?  In other languages,
libraries can do that.  It kind of seems to me that if a C library
does that, I can watch it break my legal C program.  On the other hand,
a correct strlen() function has to scan every byte of (for example)
my 300K array.  Or my 509-byte array, maybe 510-byte array, but several
thousand times.  It seems intrinsically worse to me.

--
Norman Diamond, Sony Computer Science Lab (diamond%csl.sony.co.jp@relay.cs.net)
  The above opinions are my own.   |  Why are programmers criticized for
  If they're also your opinions,   |  re-implementing the wheel, when car
  you're infringing my copyright.  |  manufacturers are praised for it?