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→History: Deleted the mention of BCPL, which did not use null-terminated strings. See Talk:BCPL#NULL-terminated strings |
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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
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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