Re: NUL to terminate strings; was reinventing ASCII?

"Eric Sosman" <esosman@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:O7WdnQ5Xbd9fKE_anZ2dnUVZ_vKunZ2d@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 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,

zero-terminated?

No.  That's incorrect too.  C's strings are null-terminated.  There is a
difference.  They aren't terminated by 32-bit or 36-bit zeros...

7.1.1 sub 1 n1256
"A string is a contiguous sequence of characters terminated by and
including
the first null character. ..."

5.2.1 sub 2
"...A byte with all bits set to 0, called the null character, shall exist
in
the basic execution character set; it is used to terminate a character
string."

6.4.4.4 sub 12
"The construction '\0' is commonly used to represent the null character."

See, they are terminated by a C byte with all bits 0, whatever value the C
system interprets that as...


D. Ritchie said this:

"The other characteristic feature of C, its treatment of arrays, is more
suspect on  practical grounds, though it also has real virtues. Although
the
relation****p between pointers and arrays is unusual, it can be learned.
Moreover, the language shows considerable power to describe im****tant
concepts, for example, vectors whose length varies at run time, with only
a
few basic rules and conventions. In particular, character strings are
handled by the same mechanisms as any other array, plus the convention
that
a null character terminates a string."

"The Development of the C Language", D. Ritchie


BTW, for ASCII, EBCDIC, PETSCII, ATASCII, UTF-8, Unicode, etc. the all
bits
zero character is named NUL...


Rod Pemberton