On Mon, 28 Jun 2010 20:55:53 -0400, Roy Smith wrote: > The nice thing about null-terminated strings is how portable they have > been over various word lengths. Life would have been truly inconvenient > if K&R had picked, say, a 16-bit length field, and then we needed to > bump that up to 32 bits in the 80's, and again to 64 bits in the 90's.
Or a Pascal 8 bit length field. However the cost of null-terminated strings is that they can't store binary data, and worse, they're slow. In fact, according to some, null- terminated strings are the *worst* way to implement a string type. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000319.html -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
