The Most Expensive One-Byte Mistake

An anonymous reader writes "Poul-Henning Kamp looks back at some of the bad decisions made in language design, specifically the C/Unix/Posix use of NUL-terminated text strings. 'The choice was really simple: Should the C language represent strings as an address + length tuple or just as the address with a magic character (NUL) marking the end? ... Using an address + length format would cost one more byte of overhead than an address + magic_marker format, and their PDP computer had limited core memory. In other words, this could have been a perfectly typical and rational IT or CS decision, like the many similar decisions we all make every day; but this one had quite atypical economic consequences.'"

Comments

Re:The Road Not Taken

[Hatta]

Everyone misunderstands every poem because poetry has no fixed meaning. It means whatever you want it to mean.

If people wish to be plainly understood, they write in prose. If they wish to have their meaning debated while not actually communicating anything, they write poetry.