17 Oct
2011
17 Oct
'11
2:36 p.m.
From: Chuck Guzis
Sent: Friday, October 14, 2011 10:30 PM
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?
On the PDP-6 (and its successor, the PDP-10), there are 2 pseudo-ops
to create a string of ASCII characters in memory, "ASCII" and
"ASCIZ".
The first creates a string containing only the characters between the
delimiters (a pair of some character which does not occur in the
string). The second adds an ASCII NUL to the end of the string.
This predates K&R by a number of years. 0-terminated strings existed
on the PDP-7, on which Unics originated, as well.
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer
Vulcan, Inc.
505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104
mailto:RichA at vulcan.com
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/