What’s the rationale for null terminated strings?

by

From the horse’s mouth

None of BCPL, B, or C supports
character data strongly in the
language; each treats strings much
like vectors of integers and
supplements general rules by a few
conventions. In both BCPL and B a
string literal denotes the address of
a static area initialized with the
characters of the string, packed into
cells. In BCPL, the first packed byte
contains the number of characters in
the string; in B, there is no count
and strings are terminated by a
special character, which B spelled
*e. This change was made partially
to avoid the limitation on the length
of a string caused by holding the
count in an 8- or 9-bit slot, and
partly because maintaining the count
seemed, in our experience, less
convenient than using a terminator.

Dennis M Ritchie, Development of the C Language

More Related Contents:

  1. Will std::string always be null-terminated in C++11?
  2. Why are strings in C++ usually terminated with ‘\0’?
  3. Using std::string_view with api that expects null-terminated string
  4. Copying non null-terminated unsigned char array to std::string
  5. How do I read an entire file into a std::string in C++?
  6. C++ convert string to hexadecimal and vice versa
  7. Replace substring with another substring C++
  8. How to use a C++ string in a structure when malloc()-ing the same structure?
  9. C++ “cin” only reads the first word [duplicate]
  10. Is string::c_str() no longer null terminated in C++11?
  11. how does one securely clear std::string?
  12. Is it a good idea to return ” const char * ” from a function?
  13. Splitting a string by a character
  14. C++ string to double conversion
  15. How to call a function by its name (std::string) in C++?
  16. Why is modifying a string through a retrieved pointer to its data not allowed?
  17. string array with garbage character at end
  18. Similar String algorithm
  19. Custom manipulator for C++ iostream
  20. Why is there no support for concatenating std::string and std::string_view?
  21. What encoding does std::string.c_str() use?
  22. how to check string start in C++
  23. Padding stl strings in C++
  24. Align cout format as table’s columns
  25. How to compare strings
  26. How to write an object to file in C++
  27. convert string to integer in c++
  28. How to convert int to string in C++
  29. What’s the difference between istringstream, ostringstream and stringstream? / Why not use stringstream in every case?
  30. Assign a string literal to a char* [duplicate]

Leave a Comment