> Tom Marchant wrote: > Well, ok, null-terminated strings are a booby-trap > included in the C language. But it was poor programming that caused the > problems.
I'm not sure how strings could be attributed to poor programming. Unix & C were designed and implemented around RISC processors. Instructions are limited to dealing with a single byte. In this situation, strings are far more optimal compared to fix length fields. IBM hardware changed that by implementing instructions like CLC and MVC. Do you consider Unix file management poor programming? It has multiple types of read (byte, halfword, fullword, string, specific length). Would you tell a C programmer they are poor programming because they don't always read a structure (similar to record). While I don't like it, I accept that it's not a common practice in C. Regards, Jon.
