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by BenjiWiebe 403 days ago
Whether the string ends in NULL or not is up to you as a programmer. It's only an array of bytes, even though the convention is to NULL-terminate it.

Well maybe more than just a convention, but there is nothing preventing you from setting the last byte to whatever you want.
1 comments
mrheosuper 403 days ago
Everything in C is just array of bytes, some would argue uint32_t is just array of 4 bytes. That's why we need convention.

A string is defined as byte array with Null at last. Remove the Null and it's not a string anymore.

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MaxBarraclough 403 days ago
> Everything in C is just array of bytes, some would argue uint32_t is just array of 4 bytes

That isn't how the C language is defined. The alignment rules may differ between those two types. Consider also the need for the union trick to portably implement type-punning in C. Also, the C standard permits for CHAR_BIT to equal 32, so in C's understanding of a 'byte', the uint32_t type might in principle correspond to just a single byte, in some exotic (but C compliant) platform.

No doubt there are other subtleties besides.

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int_19h 403 days ago
That's only one possible convention, and it's not a particularly good one at that.
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