Why is strlen so complex in C?
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Why is strlen so complex in C?
1–10 of 74 posts
Re: Why is strlen so complex in C?
#2Have there been any efforts to add real string types and maybe arrays to C? Seems a lot of complications come from the primitive/not existing implementation of strings and arrays.
Re: Why is strlen so complex in C?
#3The accepted answer fails to understand that the standard library is exempt from following the C standard and makes a number of false or overly prescriptive assertions. (It also doesn't answer the question, but that's par for the course on Stack Overflow…)
Re: Why is strlen so complex in C?
#4Have there been any efforts to add real string types and maybe arrays to C? Seems a lot of complications come from the primitive/not existing implementation of strings and arrays.
It's such a shame that C gets some things like strings so wrong.
Writing in C shouldn't have to be so painful, but I guess they were the pioneers in a lot of things and the "high level assembly" idea stuck. (Premature optimization?)
Also having objects and method calls, even if it's syntactic sugar deep down, is the best kind of syntactic sugar
Re: Why is strlen so complex in C?
#5The accepted answer fails to understand that the standard library is exempt from following the C standard and makes a number of false or overly prescriptive assertions. (It also doesn't answer the question, but that's par for the course on Stack Overflow…)
The first comment on that answer mentions this.
I would never take an answer on SO w/o a grain of salt w/o reading comments.
Re: Why is strlen so complex in C?
#6Have there been any efforts to add real string types and maybe arrays to C? Seems a lot of complications come from the primitive/not existing implementation of strings and arrays.
None that have succeeded, obviously. There are a number of alternative string libraries, though; here's one: https://github.com/antirez/sds. And I'm sure some programmers would suggest C++ as the real "effort to add real string types and maybe arrays to C" ;)
Re: Why is strlen so complex in C?
#7The accepted answer fails to understand that the standard library is exempt from following the C standard and makes a number of false or overly prescriptive assertions. (It also doesn't answer the question, but that's par for the course on Stack Overflow…)
>that's par for the course on Stack Overflow
This is tangential to the meat of your comment but I feel compelled to nitpick based entirely on personal anecdote: I have been helped hundreds of times on StackOverflow by people who had nothing to gain from it and yet provided in depth, insightful answers. In my experience, the farther you get away from the big, overwhelmed tags, the better the quality is. But you don't want to get so obscure that you are just ignored.
The Racket community on SO is particularly fantastic, and (in my experience) the more 'web' related your question is, the worse answers you get.
Re: Why is strlen so complex in C?
#8The accepted answer fails to understand that the standard library is exempt from following the C standard and makes a number of false or overly prescriptive assertions. (It also doesn't answer the question, but that's par for the course on Stack Overflow…)
>that's par for the course on Stack Overflow This is tangential to the meat of your comment but I feel compelled to nitpick based entirely on personal anecdote: I have been helped hundreds of times on StackOverflow by people who had nothing to gain from it and yet provided in depth, insightful answers. In my experience, the farther you get away from the big, overwhelmed tags, the better the quality is. But you don't…
Yes, I'm not saying that Stack Overflow doesn't have "birdies". For example, I really enjoy this user's consistently high quality answers: https://stackoverflow.com/users/224132/peter-cordes
Re: Why is strlen so complex in C?
#9Have there been any efforts to add real string types and maybe arrays to C? Seems a lot of complications come from the primitive/not existing implementation of strings and arrays.
It's such a shame that C gets some things like strings so wrong. Writing in C shouldn't have to be so painful, but I guess they were the pioneers in a lot of things and the "high level assembly" idea stuck. (Premature optimization?) Also having objects and method calls, even if it's syntactic sugar deep down, is the best kind of syntactic sugar
I think you're looking for C++, or maybe Rust.
Re: Why is strlen so complex in C?
#10Have there been any efforts to add real string types and maybe arrays to C? Seems a lot of complications come from the primitive/not existing implementation of strings and arrays.
It's such a shame that C gets some things like strings so wrong. Writing in C shouldn't have to be so painful, but I guess they were the pioneers in a lot of things and the "high level assembly" idea stuck. (Premature optimization?) Also having objects and method calls, even if it's syntactic sugar deep down, is the best kind of syntactic sugar
There was nothing "premature" about C's "high-level assembly" idea. It is somewhat archaic now, but C took off because it was so, so much better than normal assembly.
If handling strings in plain C is hard, handling them in assembly is 10x as hard.