Re: NUL to terminate strings; was reinventing ASCII?

On 2008-03-12, Wilhelm B. Kloke <wb@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>> Of course the choice of zero lends itself to varous idioms, such as
>>> "while(*p++)".
>>
>> Is that a good thing?
>
> Yes. It translates to optimal assembler code for most architectures.
> On others, while(p[i++]) would do, or while(p[i++]!=0), with the
> obvious compiler optimisation

> In contrast, the comparison to anything
> else than zero needs more bytes and processor cycles.

Not through, e.g. on x86, scasb is bounded by a number. You need a bound
anyway, since relying on unbounded strings is a security risk (and in fact
most string routines changed in later C revisions to add a limit to scan)