Tim Bray wrote:
On Dec 28, 2005, at 12:46 PM, Randy Presuhn wrote:
Reserving NUL as a special terminator is a C library-ism. I think that
history has shown that the use of this kind of mechanism, rather than
explicitly tracking the string's length, was a mistake.
I guess variably lenght V-records of type
string {int type,
int length,
int data[] );
would be horror. That will lose you 4 bytes per word and 2 bytes for
every printable sign.
C-ASCII "Randy Presuhn" = 14 char + '\0'.
Compare it to
99999, " R"," a"," n"," d"," y",
99999, " P"," r"," e"," s"," h"," u"," n"
That is 28 characters now. No alternative.
I used to think so too, but I don't any more; twenty years of doing
text processing has convinced me that C's null-terminated strings
simply cannot be improved on in a low-level programming language. For
more on the subject see http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/
2003/04/13/Strings -Tim
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