[Roboprog]

I would happily trade C ASCIIZ strings for Pascal/Perl/Java out of band length indicated strings, even at the cost of those edge cases. Especially if there were a way to internalize immutable string data, and share the bytes of common fragments. (this of course doesn't work well if you plan on modifying the string data)

[tptacek]

So make the trade. I'm sorry, I can see I'm communicating some kind of disdain for alternate string representations, but every C programmer I know --- every single one of them --- has used some form of counted string at some point.

I'm just saying there's a reason the default in C is ASCIIZ. Most of what you do with strings is lightweight; compare 'em, search 'em, tokenize 'em, copy 'em. For that 80% of use cases, ASCIIZ is superior.

Should ANSI C libc provide a heavyweight counted string alternative? Sure, I think so; in fact, it's possible that the only reason it doesn't is that it would take 300 years to resolve all the disputes about exactly what such a library should like like, since every professional C programmer has their own now.

[Roboprog]

Fair enough. Started something like that, not sure I'll ever finish it, though :-(

https://github.com/roboprog/buzzard/blob/master/bzrt/src/bzr...