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| | |-+  The Most Expensive One-byte Mistake: Nice article about programming design goofs
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Author Topic: The Most Expensive One-byte Mistake: Nice article about programming design goofs  (Read 1419 times)
mouser
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« on: August 03, 2011, 02:31:39 PM »
Fun article:

Quote
The best candidate I have been able to come up with is the C/Unix/Posix use of NUL-terminated text strings. The choice was really simple: Should the C language represent strings as an address + length tuple or just as the address with a magic character (NUL) marking the end?


from The best candidate I have been able to come up with is the C/Unix/Posix use of NUL-terminated text strings. The choice was really simple: Should the C language represent strings as an address + length tuple or just as the address with a magic character (NUL) marking the end?
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cranioscopical
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« Reply #1 on: August 03, 2011, 10:54:35 PM »
Quote from: mouser on August 03, 2011, 02:31:39 PM
The Most Expensive One-byte Mistake

Wasn't that Eve's?
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Chris
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« Reply #2 on: August 04, 2011, 02:39:16 AM »
Quote from: cranioscopical on August 03, 2011, 10:54:35 PM
Quote from: mouser on August 03, 2011, 02:31:39 PM
The Most Expensive One-byte Mistake

Wasn't that Eve's?

That's hilarious!  Grin tongue
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f0dder
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« Reply #3 on: August 04, 2011, 02:11:03 PM »
Quote from: mouser on August 03, 2011, 02:31:39 PM
Should the C language represent strings as an address + length tuple or just as the address with a magic character (NUL) marking the end?
If it had done anything else, the situation would probably be worse today.

NUL-terminated strings aren't optimal, but they were the logical choice back then, and are better than some of the alternatives. The BIG mistake is how a lot of the libc (and especially the string functions!) were designed.
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- carpe noctem
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