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A comment on Did Ken, Ritchie and Brian choose wrong with NUL-terminated text strings? (2011). Parent comment

Re:Did Ken, Ritchie and Brian choose wrong with NUL-terminat... by jerf on Tuesday January 16, 2018 @02:06PM (#16161133)
In the PDP era, they would have noticed the overhead of having a variable-length int at the beginning they would have to decode.

In the modern era, it's probably cheap to the point of being free, because in the vast majority of cases I would expect branch prediction to largely eliminate the checks as being very predictable.

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Re:Did Ken, Ritchie and Brian choose wrong with NUL-terminat... by pjmlp on Tuesday January 16, 2018 @05:24PM (#16163300)
Even in the PDP era I am not so sure, given the architectures and OSes being developed outside AT&T, some of them in production.
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Re:Did Ken, Ritchie and Brian choose wrong with NUL-terminat... by PopsiclePete on Tuesday January 16, 2018 @02:12PM (#16161220)
So then....they chose correctly?
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Re:Did Ken, Ritchie and Brian choose wrong with NUL-terminat... by jerf on Tuesday January 16, 2018 @04:10PM (#16162638)
Despite being vigorously opposed to NUL-termination in the modern era, yes, I would not criticize the people who actually made the decision for the PDP. They had no real reason to believe we'd still be discussing that decision 60 years later.
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