Re: NUL to terminate strings; was reinventing ASCII?

James Harris wrote:
> 
> On 6 Mar, 10:34, torb...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 (Torben Ægidius Mogensen)
> wrote:
> > James Harris <james.harri...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> writes:
> ...
> > Why would we need a null character?  I know that it in C is used as
> > end-of-string marker, but that is a horrible design decision.  If any
> > single character should mark the end of a string, it should be EOT.

> I expect the C folks will be able to correct me. Hence I'm copying
> them this reply.

The NUL terminator was one of the methods used to terminate
strings before C came along (other methods included setting the
high-order bit of the final character and the '$' as a
terminating character). The selection of NUL was probably an
attempt to choose a "do no harm" option, since some hardware
recognized the EOT and might react in unintended/undesirable
ways, while NUL was generally harmless.

> Of course, there are other ways strings can be defined, even in C,
> with the right library sup****t.

Stratus VOS was originally written in PL/I and their C compiler
allowed both PL/I strings (where the start-of-string included a
length) and the standard-compliant NUL terminator. (The amount of
confusion produced by using both methods in a single system has
to be experienced to be believed.)

-- 
Morris Dovey
DeSoto Solar
DeSoto, Iowa USA
http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto