None of this surprises me but it reminds me of how I described C to my older son who is learning computer science.
C is sort of like driving a sports car on a narrow mountain road with no guard rails. If you like to text while you drive, C is not for you. If you can't keep your eyes on the road, C is not for you. If you are a bad driver (programmer, duh), C is not for you. But if you are an expert driver, like to go fast, pay attention, C is just fine, great in fact. Source: been a C programmer for more than 40 years, have written commercially used products over and over again in C. I love C, I get that it is not for everyone but it is an excellent language in the hands of expert programmers. On Sun, Nov 13, 2022 at 08:08:58PM +0000, Ralph Corderoy wrote: > Hi Branden, > > > C doesn't _really_ have strings, except at the library level. > > It has character arrays and one grain of syntactic sugar for encoding > > "string literals", which should not have been called that because > > whether they get the null terminator is context-dependent. > > > > char a[5] = "fooba"; > > char *b = "bazqux"; > > > > I see some Internet sources claim that C is absolutely reliable about > > null-terminating such literals, but I can't agree. The assignment to > > `b` above adds a null terminator, and the one to `a` does not. This > > is the opposite of absolute reliability. Since I foresee someone > > calling me a liar for saying that, I'll grant that if you carry a long > > enough list of exceptional cases for the syntax in your head, both are > > predictable. But it's simply a land mine for the everyday programmer. > > - C defines both string literals and strings at the language level, > e.g. main()'s argv[] is defined to contain strings. > > - In C, "foo" is a string literal. That is the correct name as it is > not a C string because a string literal may contain explicit NUL bytes > within it which a string may not: "foo\0bar". > > - A string literal has an implicit NUL added at its end thus "foo" fills > four bytes. > > - A character array may be initialised by a string literal. Successive > elements of the array are set to the string literal's characters, > including the implicit NUL if there is room. > > char two[2] = "foo"; // 'f' 'o' > char three[3] = "foo"; // 'f' 'o' 'o' > char four[4] = "foo"; // 'f' 'o' 'o' '\0' > char five[5] = "foo"; // 'f' 'o' 'o' '\0' '\0' > char implicit[] = "foo"; // 'f' 'o' 'o' '\0' > > That's it. > > - The string literal is reliably terminating by a NUL. > - It is not context dependent whether a string literal has a terminating > NUL. > - It is absolutely reliable and clearly stated in the C standard and in > any other C reference worth its salt. > - There is no need to ???carry a long enough list of exceptional cases for > the syntax in your head???. > - An ???everyday C programmer??? will know this simple behaviour by dint of > being a C programmer who writes it every day; there is no landmine > upon which to step. :-) > > Hope that helps clear up this corner of C. > > -- > Cheers, Ralph. -- --- Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
