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→History: tense consistency, encyclopedic facts are not posited at some distant time in the past, with other later facts yet to occur as if written by a time traveler, they are all either in the past, or 'at time of writing' considered present tense or future tense. I think this tense was used to soften the obvious conflict of opinions. If people's opinions collide, this is just a dry fact, softening such facts represents PoV, antithetical to encyclopedic factuality & wiki neutrality |
→History: you still have to find the length in the first place |
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Null-terminated strings were produced by the <code>.ASCIZ</code> directive of the [[PDP-11]] [[assembly language]]s and the <code>ASCIZ</code> directive of the [[MACRO-10]] macro assembly language for the [[PDP-10]]. These predate the development of the C programming language, but other forms of strings were often used.
At the time C (and the languages that it was derived from) was developed, memory was extremely limited, so using only one byte of overhead to store the length of a string was attractive. The only popular alternative at that time, usually called a "Pascal string" (a more modern term is "[[String (computer science)#Length-prefixed|length-prefixed]]"), used a leading ''byte'' to store the length of the string. This allows the string to contain NUL and made finding the length of an already stored string, need only one memory access (O(1) [[constant time|(constant) time]]), but limited string length to 255 characters (on a machine using 8-bit bytes). C designer [[Dennis Ritchie]] chose to follow the convention of null-termination, already established in [[BCPL]], to avoid the limitation on the length of a string and because maintaining the count seemed, in his experience, less convenient than using a terminator.<ref>{{cite conference | first = Dennis M. | last = Ritchie | date = April 1993 | ___location = Cambridge, MA | title = The development of the C language | conference = Second History of Programming Languages conference | url = https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html }}</ref><ref>{{cite book | first = Dennis M. | last = Ritchie | article = The development of the C language | title =
History of Programming Languages | edition = 2 | editor-first1= Thomas J. | editor-last1= Bergin, Jr. | editor-first2 = Richard G. | editor-last2 = Gibson, Jr. | publisher = ACM Press | ___location = New York | via = Addison-Wesley (Reading, Mass) | year = 1996 | isbn = 0-201-89502-1 }}</ref>
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