alt Hacker NewsI think the concern was conserving memory ( which was scarce back then) and not iterating through each substring.
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delta_p_delta_x • today at 5:10 AM
I am very sceptical about that. Much safer and cleaner languages like ML and Lisp were contemporary to C, and were equally developed on memory-scarce hardware.
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But does it even conserve memory? Copying a string when you have the length is 2 bytes of machine code on x86 (rep movsb).
Remember, code takes up memory too.