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Author Topic: The Most Expensive One-byte Mistake: Nice article about programming design goofs  (Read 5355 times)

mouser

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Fun article:

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?

cranioscopical

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The Most Expensive One-byte Mistake

Wasn't that Eve's?

Deozaan

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The Most Expensive One-byte Mistake

Wasn't that Eve's?
-cranioscopical (August 03, 2011, 10:54 PM)

That's hilarious!  ;D :P

f0dder

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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.
- carpe noctem