Re: hosers-talk: Duh.

["Jon Stewart" <stew1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Quoth "Jon Stewart":
> > Didja' ever notice that "" and "\0" are the same strings in C/C++?
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > Jon
> 
> Since all strings are null-terminated, "" should be 0x00. But what if what 
> you want is a string that consists of a null byte? Why isn't that stored as 
> 0x0000?


Exactly some of the thinking that prompted my observation.

In C, of course, if only by convention, a double null string is 
functionally equivalent to a null string. It just wastes a byte. Since 
wasting single bytes is abhorrent to C programmers, I doubt you'll find 
much usage of that.

In C++, you may want an array -- not a string, although it's merely 
conceptual semantics differing the two -- of 0x0000. I think the best way 
to go about this is to abandon strings and use other constructs. I have a 
ByteStream class for just such purposes. My String class inherits from my 
ByteStream class so I can work with strings in a semi-nice way (it's still 
dog food), perform some hackery, and treat them like ByteStreams, for 
high-performance file I/O. (I used protected inheritance, so hackery is 
necessary, which is what I intended; treating a String as a ByteStream 
_should_ be kind of ugly and very much intentional.)

My String class, in order to work with C libs and hardcoded strings, 
uses the ByteStream mechanism (which knows nothing of null-termination -- 
a null character is just another character) and then null-terminates 
strings. Consequently, most of the code in the String class proper is 
mediating code with the ByteStream to figure out the null-termination.

What I think is funny about my observation is that it's a very good 
example of C's "worse is better" philosophy. I mean, compared to something 
like Perl, or Visual Basic, C seems morally and philosophically tight, 
coherent, and beautiful. But by making the concession to users that 
hardcoded strings, ie. "whatever", are null-terminated automatically, you 
end up with some curiosities. So it's not as free from special cases as we 
might like.



Jon
-- 
Jon Stewart
stew1@xxxxxxxxxxx

"Survey says: it was a bad idea in the first place."

	-- The Dismemberment Plan