strings

[Henry Spencer]

In article <10235 at socslgw.csl.sony.JUNET> diamond at csl.sony.junet (Norman Diamond) writes:
>Yeah, I think so.  Strings, for example.  Cobol, PL/I, Algol,
>Fortran-77, Snobol, etc., have string types and say what kind of
>operations can be done on strings.  C says that a string is terminated
>with a '\0' byte.  Instead of assigning a null string to a target,
>C programmers assign a '\0' byte, so the implementation of C library
>routines can never be speeded up.  For other languages, improvements
>are often made to implementations.

Improvements to C library routines are quite possible.  Like all such,
cleverness is sometimes required.  One convention is not intrinsically
worse than the other.
-- 
Mars in 1980s:  USSR, 2 tries, |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
2 failures; USA, 0 tries.      | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu