
Tim Bray on Dennis Ritchie - DanielRibeiro
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2011/10/12/DMR
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steve-howard
To be fair, agreement is not universal that null-byte termination is a good
thing. Though that doesn't detract a thing from the man's greatness.

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pavlov
C strings have certainly proved more useful than contemporary attempts like
Pascal strings. Those used an integer prefix to store the length of the
string, but because any language at the time was expected to provide
reasonable performance on prevalent 8-bit machines, the Pascal string length
field was only 8 bits. Hence strings were limited to 255 characters.

The null terminator is actually an elegant machine-independent solution to
this problem.

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tptacek
The NUL terminator is an extraordinary hack, in the best sense of that word,
but it is not elegant. Strings that have to be expensively interrogated to
discover their length have cost the industry billions and billions of dollars
due to the inevitable software faults they cause.

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jtchang
I would almost say there is not one piece of modern computing today that is
not touched by something Dennis Ritchie did.

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kreek
Of course we all stand on Mr. Ritchie's shoulders, and it's really just a
footnote to all this, but it's my understanding is that Brian Kernighan
contributed "hello, world" to 'The C Programming Language' book.

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spitfire
When did we agree asciiz was a good string format? I didn't agree to that!

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comex
Another nitpick:

> Creating processes by duplicating existing processes.

Most systems have moved away from that toward posix_spawn.

Still!

