> This is false; the encoding of codepoint 0 is 0x00 per the standard
Well, yes. That's the point: 0x00 is only ever used to encode codepoint 0. It never shows up anywhere else. That's precisely what the text you replied to means.
Well, yes. That's the point: 0x00 is only ever used to encode codepoint 0. It never shows up anywhere else. That's precisely what the text you replied to means.
even the C guys have moved on though, as Go (co-designed by Ken Thompson) illustrates.
This is indeed a tradeoff. The only alternatives are to either store the length of the string explicitly somewhere (the Pascal solution is to prepend the string with a fixed-size length parameter, which can be as awkward as it sounds when you get to really long strings) or to do something nasty with the string's actual contents, such as saying that the last byte of a string has its high bit set.
I think the C solution is the most reasonable when storage is really tight, and more flexible than the Pascal method in general, but I agree that it's potentially dangerous and it's annoying to have a byte which you can never represent in a string.
Why? C strings and Pascal strings can store exactly the same contents, except Pascal strings can store a literal \0, and are faster to manipulate (in many ways), at the cost of (sizeof(word) - 1) extra bytes.
C-strings are useful in extremely constrained environments when the extra few bytes of the length prefix vs the trailing \0 byte is too much to pay, but are essentially just a security risk in any other situation.