alt Hacker News> I’ve long been employing the length+data string struct. If there was one thing I could go back and time to change about the C language, it would be removal of the null-terminated string.
It's not necessary to go back in time. I proposed a way to do it in modern C - no existing code would break:
https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/C-biggest-mistake.html
It's simple, and easy to implement.
Replies
> the fatal error was not combining the array dimension with the array pointer; all it needs is a little new syntax a[...]; this won’t fix any existing code. Over time, the syntax a[] can be deprecated by convention and by compilers.
You're thinking in decades. C standard committee is slower than that. This could have worked in practice, but probably never will happen in practice. Maybe people should start considering a language like D[1] as an alternative, which seems to have the spirit of both C and Go, but with much more pragmatism than either.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D_(programming_language)#Criti...
https://web.archive.org/web/20260116161616/https://www.digit... for anyone here while we're swamping Walter's site