3 ms·

I read the article you linked. It's too bad they didn't decide to pass a fat pointer with the array dimensions. But when the article implies that null termina

I read the article you linked. It's too bad they didn't decide to pass a fat pointer with the array dimensions. But when the article implies that null terminated strings and the problems associated with them are caused by arrays decaying to pointers, I get more skeptical. I mean it's not as if arrays in C are bounds checked anyway, so how would that have helped implement strings any better? I guess you could have bounds checked them in the stdlib code, but you certainly wouldn't have gotten it for free just by knowing the array dimensions.

WalterBright 7y ago
> I mean it's not as if arrays in C are bounds checked anyway, so how would that have helped implement strings any better? I've written an awful lot of C code, and I have much experience with the D way which uses arrays instead of null termination. When I review a section of code consisting of strlen/strcat/strcpy/etc. I routinely find bugs in it, always centered around a mistake with the 0 termination. When the array bounds are available, the compiler can optionally insert array bounds checks. As for getting it for free, avoiding doing the strlen()'s is a big time saver.