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0 pointstredre35d ago0 comments

> No other data structure works like this.

In C most data structures work like this, you keep going until you find NUL (character) or NULL (pointer). E.g. Strings, array of pointers, linked lists, etc. Of course you can add length to most of those, but it isn't the canonical/traditional way of doing things.

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AlienRobot5d ago· 1 in thread

That can't be true. If you have an array of pointers it can be terminated in NULL. But an array of integers can't have a NULL value, since NULL would probably be just 0 which is a normal integer.

The null in a linked list is the null in the .next field, right? That's the way you would implemented linked lists independent of language. It's not the .value that is null.

A string is an array of characters (well, for characters representable in one byte at least) that has a specific value to represent the end of string.

It would be like if Int::MAX was reduced by 1 to make space for an Int:NUL constant that represented the end of an integer array. Or if you were creating your own ENUM, let's say for NORTH, SOUTH, EAST, WEST, and you added a fifth enumeration called Direction.NUL for use in arrays.

jkrejcha4d ago

With an variable length array of structs, you can set all the fields all to 0 at the cost of an extra member at the end. In the cases where this is, the structures are such that (either intentionally or by consequence) something with all fields zero is outside of the function's domain

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