Re: C Strings and String Literals. (Was: Pascal rides again)

[Larry McVoy]

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