Re: C vs. Ada - strings

[Keith Thompson <kst@cts.com>]

"Pascal Obry" <p.obry@wanadoo.fr> writes:
[...]
> But where did you see a C string ? In C you have a pointer to a memory
> space terminated by 'nul' !
> 
> This is not a string to me. And because C does not have strings, there is
> no operator on them you have to use strcmp, strcpy, strcat, strncmp...
> 
> Is that what a string is for C programmers :)

Serious answer: yes.

The C90 standard's definition of the term "string" is

    A string is a contiguous sequence of characters terminated by and
    including the first null character.  A "pointer to" a string is a
    pointer to its initial (lowest addressed) character.  The "length"
    of a string is the number of characters preceding the null
    character and its "value" is the sequence of the values of the
    contained characters, in order.

As for the lack of built-in operators, it's certainly nice to have "=",
":=", "<", "&", and so forth, but the fact that these are implemented
as function calls in C isn't really that big a deal.  (In other areas,
C is criticized for being too terse.)

This isn't to say that C's string handling isn't flawed.  Once of
the biggest problems is that, though a function can return a pointer
to a (variable-length) string, there's no standard way to manage the
associated memory.

-- 
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) kst@cts.com  <http://www.ghoti.net/~kst>
San Diego Supercomputer Center           <*>  <http://www.sdsc.edu/~kst>
Welcome to the last year of the 20th century.