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0 pointsm4635y ago0 comments

I think 30-40 years ago it was perfectly appropriate to null-terminate strings. Every byte actually counted.

I remember thinking about setting the high bit to denote the end of string to save space.

Nowadays the binary for "hello world" might be as big as a whole operating system of the past.

(though honestly I can't recall the size of the OS on a boot floppy, but the original floppies were 160k)

0 comments

Just a surreal reminder that 30 years ago was 1991. By that time it already didn't make sense to null terminate strings (except perhaps on embedded platforms).

munchbunny5y ago

To be fair, in 1991, 1mb of RAM was a substantial amount for a PC, so a single word per string instead of a byte per string could still add up quickly.

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