On Monday, 27 June 2016 at 05:27:12 UTC, chmike wrote:
Ending strings with a single null byte/char is to save space.
It was critical in the 70´s when C was created and memory space
was very limited. That's not the case anymore and I guess the
Not only to save space, some CPUs also had cheap incrementing
load/stores and branching on zero is faster than sacrificing
another register for a counter.
IIRC Pascal has a short string with a single byte length.
Besides there are plenty of other advantages to using a
terminating sentinel depending on the use scenario. E.g. if you
want many versions of the same tail or if you are splitting a
string at white space (overwrite a white space char with a zero).
