The Most Expensive One-byte Mistake: Nice article about programming design goofs

[mouser]

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?

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2010365

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]

The Most Expensive One-byte Mistake

Wasn't that Eve's?

[Deozaan]

The Most Expensive One-byte Mistake

Wasn't that Eve's?

That's hilarious! 

[f0dder]

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.