Re: NUL to terminate strings; was reinventing ASCII?

On 8 Mar, 17:22, Ben Bacarisse <ben.use...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
....
> So they need a terminating character unless they are defined some
> other way?  Surely the question was why were they not defined in one
> of these other ways?

Yes, I mean that to allow C strings to be defined as they are by a
single pointer requires there to be a terminating character of some
sort. (I know there are other ways to keep the pointer but which
require additional data.) This refers to strings the way they were
implmented in C. The other comment I made was that there are other
ways to define strings and these could be used in C with appropriate
library sup****t so the limitation (of having to use one value as a
terminator) is not with C itself.

> I don't think there will be a better answer than "it seemed more
> convenient than using a length" to paraphrase Richie in
> http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html

Interesting link.

--
James