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.

     (This reply is really to Mogensen, whose message I saw only
in Harris' quotation.)

     Choosing EOT would have raised an interesting problem: What
is the numeric value of this character?  (Hint: There are at
least two different answers.)  How should strings be terminated
on a system whose character set does not include an EOT?  What
about systems that sup****t multiple character encodings, switchable
at run-time, with different values for EOT in each?

     It is often said that C's strings are NUL-terminated, but this
is not correct.  They are zero-terminated, and the meaning (if any)
of zero in whatever encoding is in use at the moment is unspecified
and irrelevant.  The internal representation of a string, like the
internal representation of a double, has nothing to do with its
use in external protocols.

-- 
Eric Sosman
esosman@[EMAIL PROTECTED]