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From: poser@csli.Stanford.EDU (Bill Poser)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: strncpy
Summary: fixed size character buffers are not arbitary length strings
Message-ID: <11619@csli.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 5 Jan 90 22:06:49 GMT
References: <11527@csli.Stanford.EDU> <e-mail to mr. poser> <0000006@ki4pv.UUCP>
Sender: poser@csli.Stanford.EDU (Bill Poser)
Reply-To: poser@csli.stanford.edu (Bill Poser)
Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U.
Lines: 32

In response to my claim that:

	All other representations of arbitrary length strings
	require similar overhead, e.g. a character count in the
	descriptor.

in article <0000006@ki4pv.UUCP> tanner@ki4pv.UUCP (Dr. T. Andrews) writes:

>I beg to differ.  By defining storage fields of a certain size, and
>using strncpy() to manipulate them, "strings" of that size may be
>handled without character counts in the descriptors.

This is irrelevant. Fixed size strings are not arbitrary length strings
Please read messages before responding to them.

He continues:

>That they don't teach people about character arrays of known size
>at Stanford is purely a local teaching decision and therefore not
>a suitable subject for outside debate.

There is of course no basis for the inference that I do not know
about fixed size strings. Dr. Andrews seems to know this, as he
writes: 

	at Stanford, where strncpy() and on [sic] buffers of
	known size are an important subject of research; we expect
	Mr. Poser's paper on the same shortly.

In any case, I have no idea what is taught
on this subject at Stanford, as I am neither a student nor a member of the
Computer Science faculty. I first began to use C at Bell Labs.