On Thursday, July 05, 2012 19:59:26 Wouter Verhelst wrote: > Well, really, strings in C are just a special case of arrays (as is true > in D as well), and arrays in C are just a special case of pointers > (which isn't true in D). That means the language is fairly compact, > which also means the compiler has much lower resource > requirements. I think that, much more than any requirements at runtime, > has driven the choice for zero-terminated strings. > > Just for comparison, what happens to DMD's memory usage when you do > extensive templating wouldn't have been possible back in 1969 ;-)
There are a number of things that we do now with programming languages that you couldn't do when C was created. Having arrays that know their length is not one of them. Other languages in that time frame did it. C made the horrendous mistake of not doing it. - Jonathan M Davis
