On Tuesday, 2 October 2012 at 11:10:46 UTC, Don Clugston wrote:
[SNIP] A proposal to clean up this mess [SNIP]
While I think it is convenient to be able to write 'printf("world");', as you point out, I think that the fact that it works "inconsistently" (and by that, I mean there are rules and exceptions), is even more dangerous.
If at all possible, I'd rather side with consistency, then the "we got your back... except when we don't" approach: IE: strings are NEVER null terminated.
In theory, how often do you *really* need null terminated strings? And when you do, wouldn't it be safer to just write 'printf("world\0")'? or 'printf(str ~ "world" ~ '\0');' rather than "Am I in a case where it is null terminated? Yeah... 90% confident I am..."
If you want 0 termination, then make it explicit, that's my opinion.
Besides, as you said, the null termination is not documented, so anything relying on it is a bug really. Just an observation of an implementation detail.
