14 Oct
2011
14 Oct
'11
10:29 p.m.
On 14 Oct 2011 at 23:23, Toby Thain wrote:
while(*s++ = *t++)
One of the most evil programming conventions ever foisted on the
computer community--null-terminated character strings. While I'm
sure that Messrs. K&R didn't intend it to become a hard-and-fast
convention, it served to hammer young minds into thinking that way.
Before C and its ilk, did *any* language's compiler store character
strings that way, aside from variable word- and record-length
machines like the 1401 and 1620?
Consider what a problem this is on a machine where the smallest
addressing granularity is a 64 bit word.
From a compilation standpoint, it makes literal pooling
by the
compiler nearly impossible, wasting space.
--Chuck