Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!apollo!mrst!sdti!turner
From: turner@sdti.SDTI.COM (Prescott K. Turner)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: strings
Summary: second class
Message-ID: <456@sdti.SDTI.COM>
Date: 12 May 89 14:53:00 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>
Reply-To: turner@sdti.UUCP (0006-Prescott K. Turner, Jr.)
Organization: Software Development Technologies, Sudbury MA
Lines: 22

In article <1989May11.155935.22324@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
>In article <10235@socslgw.csl.sony.JUNET> diamond@csl.sony.junet (Norman Diamond) writes:
>>Strings, for example.
>> ...
>>C says that a string is terminated with 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.

Diamond is right.  C is worse because it specifies not just the operations on
string types and their meaning, but the representation of strings.  As Paul
Abrahams put it in SIGPLAN Notices 23:10, "Some Sad Remarks About String
Handling in C", "C strings are not first class objects."  He gives details of
how this prevents the clever from succeeding.
--
Prescott K. Turner, Jr.
Software Development Technologies, Inc.
P.O. Box 366, Sudbury, MA 01776 USA         (508) 443-5779
UUCP: ...{harvard,mit-eddie}!sdti!turner    Internet: turner@sdti.sdti.com