Re: NUL to terminate strings; was reinventing ASCII?

"Eric Sosman" <esosman@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:csqdnYXM0v3Y4UfanZ2dnUVZ_gKdnZ2d@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>      It was not my impression that Pemberton was proposing
> "fat pointers."  Even if he were, there would be problems
> (perhaps not insuperable, but problems nonetheless) me****ng
> such a scheme with C's view of the world:
>
....
>insuperable

C has a defined method for stings.  So, one use for "headered" strings in
the C context is to provide _tem****ary_ C compatibility with some other
existing implementation, e.g., converting a database and ****ting database
application code to C.  So, for those in such a situation, I think the
question is: "How near to C compliance can headered strings become?"  The
fundamental principle that C maps everything onto contiguous sequences of
characters or bytes will most likely be broken in the process... since a
header must be there to be recognized a string.  But, with limitations,
e.g., only passing 'decayed' pointers to the start of declared string
objects to string functions, I think C could work for the most part with
some C incompatible implementation.


Rod Pemberton