Re: NUL to terminate strings; was reinventing ASCII?

In article <jg7ig8c3il.fsf@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
Micah Cowan  <micah@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

>> For one thing, that is a legal character in strings. You'd prevent
>> people using the ASCII char set from creating strings with EOT (or ETX
>> or whatever).

>Yeah. AIUI, ETX (and EOT, ST and others) were usually intended for
>embedding "out of band" control strings of various kinds, intended for
>interpretation by one of the communication devices to which it was
>passed. An inability to output these to such a device (except via
>putchar()) would be pretty ***bersome, I think.

I doubt it would make much difference in practice.  How many strings
have you seen with such characters in them?  putchar() is quite likely
to be the natural function to use.  And programs that controlled such
devices (I use the past tense deliberately) were probably equally
likely to have to send nuls for timing purposes.

(It was common to send nulls after carriage-returns to allow time for
the carriage to return.  See the unix stty command for evidence.)

-- Richard
-- 
:wq