Null-Terminated Strings

Posted Nov 18, 2010 16:40 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Null-Terminated Strings by Cyberax
Parent article: Ghosts of Unix past, part 3: Unfixable designs

Yes, I talked about that as well. Nice to know that reading five paragraphs of text is too much for you.

Null-Terminated Strings

Posted Nov 18, 2010 17:04 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

I read it completely. However, you point about: "The biggest downside is probably a long-term ABI problem. The scheme is inflexible. If your Pascal string-length header is too short, however do you expand it? It's wired into every string-using program out there! At least nul-terminated strings need no expansion" is not correct.

Null-Terminated Strings

Posted Nov 25, 2010 13:10 UTC (Thu) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link] (1 responses)

I agree with him that Pascal's strings are inflexible: think about two computer communicating together one with a 32-bit CPU, one with a 64-bit CPU, if you use a word as a length, you have an issue with Pascal's strings,
but C-strings don't care..

Null-Terminated Strings

Posted Nov 25, 2010 16:22 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

No, you haven't... (Original) Pascal "strings" were just (packed) arrays of characters of a fixed length.

/me ducks and runs for cover