Re: NUL to terminate strings; was reinventing ASCII?

In article <7zlk4p4lvp.fsf@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
Torben Ægidius Mogensen <torbenm@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

>> 1. strings need a terminating character

>True, but why does the terminating character need to be null?  There
>is in the ASCII alphabet a control character EOT representing
>end-of-text.  That seems like a much more appropriate terminating
>character.

.... if you want to tie that language to a particular character set.
C doesn't define a terminating character, it defines a terminating
integer value.

[Actually EOT is "end of transmission".  ETX is end of text.]

I suppose it could not specify the value, but have a #defined constant
or a character escape which varied between implementations, and ASCII
implementations could use EOT.

Of course the choice of zero lends itself to varous idioms, such as
"while(*p++)".

-- Richard
-- 
:wq