4 ms·

> null terminated strings are a joke. There was a quiet market war some forty years ago about that, and Pascal lost. But yeah, now we can afford it, the downs

> null terminated strings are a joke. There was a quiet market war some forty years ago about that, and Pascal lost. But yeah, now we can afford it, the downsides vastly exceed the vanishing cost.

stkdump 7y ago
I think the problem with Pascal's strings wasn't that they stored a length. The problem was that every string variable always occupied 256 bytes of RAM and no string could ever be bigger than 255 characters.
- sllabres 7y ago
  UCSD-, TP/BP-, Freepascal?
  - sllabres 7y ago
    I was in the impression that TP strings grew dynamically (memory), but I just checked for TP and this seems to be wrong. Probably too much time has passed since then ;)
greiskul 7y ago
And looking at modern languages, I would say that C strings also lost, just latter, since none of them do strings that way anymore.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  A good reason for adding a modern string type to C would be for better interop between other languages and C.