From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,45b47ecb995e7a3 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2001-08-14 02:38:47 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!newsfeed.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news.tele.dk!small.news.tele.dk!148.122.208.68!news2.oke.nextra.no!nextra.com!news1.oke.nextra.no.POSTED!not-for-mail Sender: ohk@maestro.clustra.com Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Ada Idioms Progress Preview References: <3B6F1B2F.4FC3C833@gsde.hou.us.ray.com> <5ee5b646.0108071819.6e84e33d@posting.google.com> <3_Xc7.45$NM5.84779@news.pacbell.net> From: Ole-Hjalmar Kristensen Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.0808 (Gnus v5.8.8) Emacs/20.3 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii NNTP-Posting-Host: 194.143.59.98 X-Complaints-To: news-abuse@nextra.no NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 11:38:02 MET DST Organization: Nextra Public Access X-Trace: readme.online.no 997781882 194.143.59.98 Date: 14 Aug 2001 11:38:34 +0200 Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:11898 Date: 2001-08-14T11:38:34+02:00 List-Id: lutz@iks-jena.de (Lutz Donnerhacke) writes: > * Ole-Hjalmar Kristensen wrote: > >One thing which can be said in favour of having a terminator character is > >that it frees you from having to store the length explicitly. > > This requires an out-of-band terminator, which does not exists in C. > Instead they prefer to use a valid character they do not need at the moment. > > But the real problem of a terminator character is creating a view: > In order to reference a substring you have to create a full copy of the > substring because you have to insert the terminal character. Inserting it > directly into the main version would cause serve damage. > > Dealing with copies: > - is time inefficient. > - is semantical different modulo modifications. > - is space inefficient. > - requires heap space instead of stack space. > > >The length of a string is usually different from the size of the array > >used to store the string. > > It's not necessary to provide a buffer to hold any possible string of a > given type if you can pass complex objects to or from a function. C can only > pass primitive types and therefore switched to passing pointers of implicit > terminated arrays. Close, but not quite. C will happily pass records by value. -- Kabelsalat ist gesund. Ole-Hj. Kristensen